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Home of The Saturday Evening PostThu, 24 May 2018 16:00:30 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.6Five in the Fifthhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/five-in-the-fifth.html
Mon, 28 Dec 2015 15:00:54 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113048Fourth runner-up in the 2016 Great American Fiction Contest: Working at the Evergreen Nursing Home, young Jerry Keller didn't think much about the future until he met Millie.

“I can’t take your money, Mill. I’d be fired tomorrow. I think you’re a little confused. The nurse will be in shortly. You need a good night’s sleep.”

The television was rolling but Jerry never looked up. Televisions played continuously in every room of the nursing home. His shift was almost over and he was anxious to get to the locker room. He’d been at the Evergreen Nursing Home so long that the odors were second nature to him, but his buddies would puke if he showed up at Zingers before showering. Cleaning vomit from the patients came with the job; dealing with their crap was another issue entirely.

At 7 o’clock, he stepped through the door of Wing Zingers. His friends had their Buds in hand and were sucking them up. He grabbed a Saranac at the bar, then slid into a booth beside Mike.

“So my good men, tell me what’s happening.”

Canyon lifted an eyebrow. “Same ole, same ole.”

The “same ole” was just as boring with the beer bottles emptied. Jerry stretched to catch a glance at the television anchored on a wall high above them. A sports commentator caught his attention. He turned to his buddies with eyes popping.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what,” Mike asked dryly.

“Santa Anita! The fifth horse in the fifth race had the biggest payout in the track’s history.”

“Didn’t know you were playing the horses,” Canyon remarked with mild surprise.

“I don’t. It’s just that an old woman at the home tried to give me a fin today. She said Santa, five in the fifth.”

The other men roared in laughter.

Canyon wiped tears from his face. “You’re telling us some old bat at the nursing home knew that horse was gonna win. You gotta be kidding.”

“I don’t know.” Jerry was clearly puzzled. “She had the five in her hand.” He lifted a shoulder expressing doubt. “She said five in the fifth.”

Mike gave him a patronizing look. “Listen to yourself, man. You say she had a five in her hand. Five, fifth, it’s all the same. She was getting mixed up, probably wanted change. You’ve been at that place too long, Jer. I think you’re losing it.”

Canyon shook his head. “I never knew why you took that job in the first place.”

“My unemployment was running out. So many of us were out of work when the dealership shut down, I didn’t have a whole lot of choices. You know what they say, plenty of jobs in the service industry.”

Mike gave him a wiry smile. “I’d flip burgers before I’d wipe butts.”

“It’s not so bad when you get used to it. The poor souls need someone to help them out. And Evergreen has a good benefits plan.”

“Benefits! You thinking of getting married or somethin’?”

Read all six winning stories from The 2016 Great American Fiction Contest

Jerry didn’t respond. Mike and Canyon knew very well he hadn’t had a girlfriend since the breakup over a year ago. In fact, he had little to say through the rest of the evening. His mind was on Mildred Johnson.

The following morning, he was annoyed to find a reassignment had put him in a wing far removed from the patient he wanted to see. When the hands of a clock pointed to lunch, he zigzagged through corridors to the old lady’s room.

“Hey Millie, how’s my girl today?”

The woman jerked in her chair but was unable to turn around. Experience at the nursing home had taught him there was no affliction worse than the destruction of a stroke. He positioned himself in front of her chair, then squatted.

“Millie, I’ve got to ask you something. Yesterday, when you tried to press that five on me, were you asking me to bet on a horse?”

The woman’s mouth spread to a crooked smile. She nodded her head ever so slightly as her eyes began to sparkle.

“The five horse in the fifth race at Santa Anita?”

Millie nodded again.

Jerry’s eyes veered toward the television. It was tuned to HRTV. The implications were startling.

“Millie, in your earlier life, were you involved with horses?”

Another nod.

“Mill, we’ve got to come up with some means of communication here. Can you say yes?”

Though slightly garbled, she did produce a yes.

“How about no?”

Millie’s “no” rang clear as a bell.

“Okay.” Jerry took a deep breath, his merry gray eyes suddenly intense. “Did you work with horses?”

“Yes.”

Jerry’s questions would be stabs in the dark. “Did you work with thoroughbred race horses?”

“Yes.”

“Did you work for yourself or someone else? Let me rephrase that; did you work for someone?”

“Yes.”

Jerry scratched his head. “Professional or family?”

Consternation grabbed him as Millie grunted both. Did she mean she had worked with professionals and family or that someone in her family was a professional? She seemed amused at his befuddlement. He took another shot.

“Was someone in your family a professional?”

Millie glowed as she answered in the affirmative.

“Your husband, father? Was one of them a trainer or something?”

Millie was nodding her head with that lopsided smile.

“Was he good? Big-time race horses?”

As Millie nodded, Jerry leaned back on his haunches. With a wide grin, he skipped the questions to make a statement. “I bet you rode some of those broncos.”

“Yes,” Millie gushed and her tale was nearly complete.

Jerry turned his head to find one of the nurses standing in the doorway.

Astonishment held Amy Rush’s tongue. Mildred Johnson had been a resident at Evergreen for over a year. Therapy had failed. It was generally thought that her cerebral capability had been ravaged beyond stimulation. Yet, here she sat animatedly answering each of Jerry’s questions. She couldn’t believe it. Jeremy Keller was a charmer. But even so …

Jerry stood to leave, but not before making a promise. “I’ll be back, Mill. We have a date for 12, noon, tomorrow.”

True to his word, he appeared the next day with coffee and a sandwich in hand. If they were going to lunch together, he had to eat. Skipping the subject of horses, he took a more personal line of questioning.

“You don’t have to answer, but I wondered. Were you ever married?”

Millie nodded then mustered the effort of a short reply. “Died young.”

“Your husband?” Jerry inquired trying to keep the picture straight. At Millie’s nod he ruminated. “I’m sorry to hear that. Did you have children?”

“Boy,” she answered. The blue eyes drifted as her thoughts ran back to another place in time. With words separated by the strain of remembering, she continued her explanation. “Boy-died-in-crash-with-his-Dad.”

Jerry swallowed hard. “You’ve had quite a life haven’t you?”

She looked at him pointedly. “Ery-one-does.” Her hand rose slightly with the index finger pointing toward him.

“Me? You want to know about me?”

Millie nodded.

“There isn’t much to tell. My mom took off when I was 2. I have no memory of her at all. My father liked to drink.”

Millie nodded encouragingly.

“He went into the hospital two weeks before my high school graduation. He died two weeks after I received my diploma. I used to work at a car dealership. I wasn’t a mechanic; I did odd jobs like washing cars. I live alone. Once thought about getting a dog, but my landlord wouldn’t like it.

“You know, Mill, I can’t take your money even to place a bet. But if you give me a tip, I can wager my own. We win; we split.”

The visits continued on a daily basis. Once or twice a week, Millie would handicap a horse. If they won, and most often they did, Jerry would place half of the earnings in Millie’s nightstand.

He arrived one day to find Amy Rush puttering about the room. She looked up upon his arrival giving the distinct impression that she had been waiting for him.

“I’ve noticed,” Amy said slowly, “that money has been accumulating in Millie’s drawer.”

“Is there anything wrong in that?” Jerry inquired.

“Not directly, but you know residents are discouraged from having money in their rooms. It encourages theft.”

Disappointment clouded Millie’s expression. It wasn’t that she had any place or any need to spend her money, but it had become a symbol of Jerry’s friendship and a reminder of things past.

Amy looked down at the tissue box sitting in the drawer. If the money were placed in the box with a tissue on top, no one would know of its existence. On the other hand, if something happened to Mildred, the tissue box would be tossed with the money still inside.

Millie and Jerry were stock still and watching. Amy let out a sigh. Far be it from her to interrupt this relationship.

“Why don’t you hide the money in the tissue box?”

The two smiled; the issue was settled, and Amy made her departure.

Jerry stuffed money beneath the tissues then turned to Millie with a question. “Why is it that all of our bets are made on West Coast tracks?”

“Time,” she answered.

It took a moment before the facts dawned on him. “I get it. By the time I’m through work it’s too late for East Coast races.”

Millie twisted her mouth in a smile.

“There’s nothing dumb about you, ma’mam.”

Jerry did a bit of research and found that Red Gorman, Millie’s father, had been a highly successful trainer in the ’30s and ’40s racking up over 1,000 wins. As the window of the old lady’s life expanded, Jerry’s affection for her grew. He surprised her with a visit on a Sunday morning. The delight it brought was evident as he wheeled her to the elevator then out to the pavilion where she could get a breath of fresh air.

“Figgie Lakes,” she remarked as they sat in the garden. “Four in eighth.”

For a minute or two, Jerry’s face remained blank. “Oh, that’s right, Finger Lakes runs on Sunday. You got a good one Mill?”

“Oh, yes.” she said with quiet sincerity.

On leaving Evergreen, Jerry made a snap decision winding his way over to Route 96 heading southeast toward Farmington. To understand a sport, one had to witness it live. He entered the Finger Lakes parking lot without a fee. Surprises never cease. Then he entered the building free of charge. As he looked around, reality hit him. The bulk of the patrons at Finger Lakes were racino fans gambling at the slots. Well, he thought, they can have their machines. I’m here to watch horses.

He walked to the fence, soaking in every aspect of this new environment. The melodic sound of a bugle call brought the soft thud of hooves out onto the track. Sleek and beautiful, the horses were as different from each other as one human to another. Some appeared nervous, snorting and dancing. Others walked quietly with no affectations.

Six horses had been loaded in the gate when a rambunctious colt reared on his powerful legs striking the air six feet above ground. The horse fought viciously forcing his jockey to dismount. Gate workers in flak jackets maneuvered this bad boy back to the gate. The jockey climbed into the gate to mount from inside like a bronc rider.

The bell rang, the gate flew open, and “bad boy” took the lead. Well, thought Jerry, it seems that fellow was anxious to run. The colt led the pack until the final turn when challengers passed him as if he were standing still. Bad boy finished last.

How does Millie do it? he wondered. How does she know which horse to pick? He went back to the mezzanine to buy a program. For an hour and a half, he studied what looked like hieroglyphics, then went to the window to place Millie’s bet. A few minutes later, he cashed his ticket.

Monday noon he placed Millie’s earning in the tissue box. “You know, Mill, I really enjoyed my trip to the track. In fact, I loved it. I’m thinking about working there.”

Millie jerked. “No!” She was nearly shouting.

“Millie, Millie, don’t worry. I’m not going to give up my day job. A security guard introduced me to a trainer, Rio Smith. I can work as a hot walker from 5 till 7, six mornings a week.” He smiled ruefully. “You don’t see a career for me in racing?”

Millie shook her head. “Doctor,” was her reply.

“Doctor! You think I should be a doctor! Whatever gave you such an idea?“

“Com-pas-sion,” she answered with a halt between syllables.

“Compassion? It takes more than compassion to become a doctor. I’ve never taken a college course. I barely got out of high school.”

Millie made an effort to tap her skull.

“You think I’m smart?” Jerry asked incredulously.

Millie nodded.

“Well, you’re the first. No one ever thought I was smart.”

Throughout the summer Jerry walked horses. He met Millie at noon each day, and went to bed early every night. Mike and Canyon were of the opinion that he’d totally lost his mind. But Jerry loved every aspect of racing: rubbing the horse’s soft coat after a morning workout, the rippling of muscles as they galloped the track, and the welcome nickers he received when walking the shed row. Hope followed every post parade, and he learned to read the program.

When fall rolled around, he made another surprise decision.

“Mill, I can’t believe I’m doing this. I’ve enrolled in an evening class at the University of Rochester. I’ll probably flunk out, but I’m going to give it a try.”

Millie smiled her crooked smile. She seemed tired of late. While her speech had been improving, the progress had stopped. As Jerry knelt close, she put a hand to his face, her expression both sweet and sad. “I proud Jer-lie.”

The track closing in November came just in time, as finals were right around the corner. An A in English encouraged him to double his course load for the spring semester.

He spent every noon sitting with an old woman discussing horses and his progress at the college.

Who would have believed it? When the grades for his second semester came back he had a 3.7 average, and he couldn’t wait for morning to report the news. Thoughts tumbled through his head as he drove toward the home. If he took just one summer course, he’d have a whole semester of college under his belt. If he started full time in the fall and continued with a single course every summer, he could finish a degree in three years. He’d give up his day job and keep the hot walks. They didn’t teach anything at 5 in the morning.

Visiting hours were over when he arrived at Evergreen. With the flash of his badge, security passed him through. The bright lights of day hours had dimmed. It was funny; in all the time he’d worked at Evergreen he’d never been there at night. As he neared Millie’s room, he broke out in a sweat. Lights were bright where they should have been dark. He rushed to the door to find the room empty.

His throat constricted as he ran to the nurse’s station. “Mildred Johnson,” he blurted.

“Are you a relative?” the nurse inquired.

“Yeah, yeah I am. Where is she?”

“I’m sorry. If we’d known she had relatives, we would have been in contact. Mildred passed away several hours ago.”

Jerry stepped back shaking his head. “No! I don’t understand. I was with her this noon.”

“Mildred had been failing. Her heart couldn’t keep pace with her spirit. If it’s any comfort, she passed away peacefully. I don’t know if you had plans for any arrangements, but her written request was to be cremated.”

“Arrangements!” Jerry wanted to puke. “What the hell? Make arrangements!” His voice was rising with frustration and anger. He wadded his transcript into a ball and fired it across the hall. Hurt and helpless, he retreated from the catacombs of Evergreen as fast as his legs would take him.

The following morning, he called in sick. Thoughts of the nursing home turned his stomach. The phone rang midmorning, forcing him out of bed.

“Jerry?”

He recognized the voice, but couldn’t place it.

“This is Amy Rush. I’m a nurse at Evergreen.”

“Oh, yes. I remember. How are you?”

“I’m fine, but I began to worry about you when they said you were sick. I worked extra hours yesterday. I was with Mildred when she died.”

A lump formed in Jerry’s throat forcing a sob he couldn’t control. “I loved that old lady.”

“I know you did. I don’t think she had anyone else.”

Nor did I, thought Jerry.

“I’m not quite sure how to put this, but I can give you the name of the funeral service that took her remains … if you wanted to take the ashes. I’m sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have called about this.”

“No, it’s all right.”

“Why don’t you stop by the home tomorrow? No one will fault you. One of the benefits of working here is grievance time. I’ll give you the information and a couple of other things I think you might want.”

Jerry slammed the door of his Jeep and looked toward the nursing home as he crossed the parking lot the following morning. His view of things had changed. He found Amy Rush at her station.

“Jerry, I’m so sorry. She suffered for such a long time. Her passing was expected.”

“Not by me.”

“I know.” She pulled an envelope from the drawer. “Information on the funeral home is in here along with Millie’s small cache of mementos. Alan Rice, director of patient services, signed a statement referencing you as the only person of contact. You might need that to get her ashes.”

Jerry looked more closely at Nurse Rush. She was a pretty woman with dark hair and soft brown eyes.

“I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” he said. Then with nothing to add, he nodded and left.

Amy sighed, wondering if he’d bothered to notice the third finger of her left hand. She wore no rings and had no ties.

Jerry held the sealed envelope until he reached the Jeep then dumped its contents onto the seat. The first thing he saw was the money. Four hundred and fifty dollars. Amy had emptied the tissue box. He set the money aside.

The photographs were old. One of the images was of a man in a fedora holding the reins of a rangy thoroughbred. The suit placed him somewhere around the 1930s. Probably Millie’s father. A threesome gazed from the second photo: a smiling woman and a handsome young man holding a child in his arms. There was a tattered card dated 1941, Red Gorman’s trainer’s license. All that remained of the life Millie loved had been horse racing, and she’d given that to him.

He owed the old lady. On reaching his apartment, he dialed Finger Lakes and asked for the track manager. A brief discussion left him satisfied. He had three more calls to make: Rio Smith, the trainer; an exercise girl who did morning workouts; and the last unfortunate call rang through to Nigel’s Funeral Service.

The ashes were in a pretty container. Jerry was pleased at that. Millie deserved better, but this was the best he could do. Rio and Pattie were waiting at the track. Rio eyed him carefully.

“You okay, kid?”

Jerry nodded. “Are we ready?”

“Guess so,” Pattie replied climbing onto Rio’s pony.

Jerry handed her the pink container. Holding it carefully, she walked the horse out onto the track with Jerry and Rio following. Along the way heads turned. Nothing was secret at a race track. A security guard opened the gate to the infield and Pattie rode quietly forward.

“I want you to gallop, Pattie. I want those ashes to fly with the wind.”

“Gotcha, Jer.”

Pattie guided Rio’s horse to the far end of the oval, then turned and picked up a trot. In a matter of seconds, she was at a full gallop, one arm extended out to her side was trailed by a plume of gray.

“God speed, dear Millie. God speed.”

Though Jerry murmured the wish under his breath, it wasn’t lost on Rio.

“You really loved the old dame, didn’t you?”

“She changed my life.”

Pattie returned with the empty container. “Never done anything like that before, yet somehow it felt right.”

They were returning the pony to his stall when a groom passed by. The big bay colt on the end of his shank gave Jerry a start. The animal moved with a sort of majesty as if waiting for bystanders to bow.

“Who’s that?” Jerry asked.

Rio laughed. “He’s a stand-out colt. Had some issues in his first few starts. They brought him here to work things out. You know, away from the eyes of the big guys. If he runs well today, I expect they’ll ship him to Saratoga.”

“What’s his name?”

Rio laughed again, his paunch bouncing rhythmically at what he saw to be a joke. “Compassion. His name is Compassion.”

“See you later,” Jerry called.

“Where you going?”

“I’ve got $450 and a tip on a horse. Where do you think I’m going? It takes a lot of money to get through med school.”

]]>Welcoming Deathhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/welcoming-death.html
Mon, 28 Dec 2015 15:00:46 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113040Third runner-up in the 2016 Great American Fiction Contest: Was Perry really face to face with Death, or was it all just an elaborate dream?

]]>Perry had always believed that after death, there was only infinite blackness; to find himself, then, in what appeared to be a sleazy cash advance storefront was somewhat surprising.

“Next,” droned the secretary behind the counter, and Perry realized she meant him. “Name, date of birth, and geographical coordinates of your exiting.” Her hair was sprayed and hardened into a style depictive of the 1950s.

Perry glanced behind him; the line snarled out and into a vacant parking lot farther than he could determine. “Excuse me,” he coughed, blinking dramatically, “but … where am I?”

The secretary peeked up then grumbled, “So you saw a line and thought you should cut, huh?” And in a loud voice she called, “We got a breather!” Immediately, two burly women burst from one of the doors behind the secretary and grabbed Perry by the biceps, towing him through another door on the opposite side. There, a terrific gray light blinded him, and the next thing he knew he was sitting across from a man in a windowless office.

“Just a minute,” said the balding man, his wire-rimmed glasses halfway down his nose. He scribbled on a form, before he pitched the folder over his shoulder and toward one of the impossibly balanced piles behind him. It landed perfectly on top. “Now, how can I help you?”

Perry pulled at the loose fabric of his pants. “What’s … happening?”

The squat man flashed a brusque smile and flicked through a tower of folders. He stopped on one that looked the same as every other. “Perry J. Costa,” he read. “Forty-eight years old. Two children. One ex-wife. Heart attack while browsing the Internet at work. Sound right?”

The memories came to Perry like a nail gun to his skull. “I’m” — he panted — “Am I dead?”

The other man cleared his throat then jazzily danced his hands and sung, “They call me Death.” From somewhere, a tinkling sound effect played, but upon its conclusion, Death resumed his sober disposition.

“But you …” Perry began to have difficulty breathing.

“I know. I look like a tax lawyer. Stupid joke.”

All around Perry, the colors of the room seemed to turn soupy, his thoughts like the music of a merry-go-round getting faster and faster, the melody becoming shriller, distorted; the world ingesting him like —

Death snapped his fingers, and suddenly, everything popped into focus, Perry abruptly feeling as though he had taken a couple of his ex-wife’s anxiety pills. “You’re just dying,” said Death. “You haven’t died.” He dragged a finger down Perry’s folder. “Right now, the EMT’s are entering your building. You have until they try to resuscitate you to convince me.”

“To convince you?” said Perry. Though his mind had somehow surrendered to this reality, he could still discern something monumental was approaching.

“Yes,” said Death, “as to whether I put you back in that line or process your paperwork right now.” Perry squinted, confused. “Look,” said Death, and he pulled down a string hanging above his desk. A white screen unrolled from the ceiling like a map kept above a chalkboard. “There’s you,” said Death, pointing to a stick figure with Xs for eyes. “And there’s me.” He pointed to a magnificent drawing of a body builder in judicial robes. “You convince me, got it?”

Death yanked the string and the screen clattered upward. “Persuade me to either relocate you to that line you stood in a couple minutes ago, or to send you on to the next stage in the process.”

Before … whatever this was, Perry had been an insurance adjuster, where he had been the one needing the convincing. “And how exactly” — he wet his lips — “do I do that?”

Death smiled with all of his teeth. “Why, you pass the test.” Pulling open a drawer, Death retrieved a pack of cigarettes and smacked one out. “You mind?” Without waiting for a response, he lit it. “Typically, the test is a three-step process,” wheezed Death, who began coughing after his first drag. “First, there’s the first part. Next, comes the next part. And you’ll conclude with the conclusion. Are you ready?”

“Wait, what? That didn’t —”

“Fantastic!” said Death, and he reached forward for Perry’s wrist, pinned it to the table, then took the cherry end of his cigarette and buried it into the flesh on the back of Perry’s hand.

Screaming. Lots of screaming.

Then blackness.

Read all six winning stories from The 2016 Great American Fiction Contest

Not a complete sort of blackness, but the kind that comes when you first turn the lights out and your eyes have yet to adjust. And a few moments later, Perry was able to blink some shapes back into vision. He was treading water — a black and milky type of water — inside of a cylinder that extended upward as far as Perry could see. “Hello!” he shouted. The burn on the back of his hand tingled. “Is anyone —”

“Please, stop yelling,” said Death. He was doing the backstroke in circles around their encasement. “More is always accomplished with quieter voices.”

“What’s going on? What’d you do to me?”

“What’d you do to yourself, Perry J. Costa?” Death rolled over and began doing the breaststroke. For such a squat man, he was remarkably lithe. “You’re now on” — he dipped underwater — “of the test. This here is” — he went under again — “bottom to escape. My best advice” — down he went — “no do-over. Best to save” — he submerged — “drowning isn’t all that pleasant.” He paused his circuit, treading with only his legs.

Perry’s eyes bulged. “I didn’t get any of that!” Death motioned at him to lower his voice, and Perry hissed, “What am I doing here? Where are we?”

Death scrunched his face as though it were obvious. “We’re inside a pen.”

“A pen?”

“And you have until —” suddenly, the whole pool slammed to the right, Perry knocked beneath a swell of ink “— until she finishes writing her sentence.” Perry clawed to stay above the liquid. “That means” — and Death mimed writing the sentence: boredom is the absence of a good idea “— you have about 17 seconds.” He grinned. “Good luck, Perry.” Then he slid straight under as though reeled downward by his feet.

Perry groped about the ink (briefly wondering why it wasn’t more viscous) as he scrabbled through his memory of everything Death had said. He was in a pen?! A pen? What kind of ludicrous test was this? The walls jumped forward again, and ink splashed madly.

Escape at the bottom. That Death had said.

With a choppy gulp of air, Perry dove. Beneath the surface, opening his eyes was useless, while the scratch of the nib reverberated monstrously. Again, the pen jostled, and one of the walls smacked Perry, losing his breath and tumbling him in the endless blackness. And once recovered, he had no idea which way was down; however, his body’s reckless need for breath concerned him more. The bobbing of his esophagus. The scraping of his lungs. His jaw pleaded to open, and finally, Perry, thrashing hopelessly, yielded.

Ink guzzled inside his mouth and plunged into his lungs. Spasms across his chest tried to push it out, find air, breathe, breathe, but the horror was resolute. Perry was drowning. And as the blackness outside became blackness inside, Perry became indistinguishable from that infinite darkness.

Until he wasn’t.

When he blinked, there was only blue sky — beautiful, robin egg blue sky — the drowning moments ago, nothing more than a sweaty nightmare. And he was swinging — on a playground swing. His hands around the chains. His hips pinched atop the concave seat. And pumping his legs, the gaiety inside of him thickened into laughter. Until he looked down. For there beneath him was lots and lots of air, the distant ground hundreds of feet away.

Perry shrieked.

“You failed,” came Death’s voice from behind. And when Perry peeped backward, he found his swing set attached and extended from a cliff.

Perry’s hands gnarled around the chains. “Am I … am I dead then?”

Death huffed. “What’s with all the concern about whether or not you’re dead? You failed. That should be your grievance.”

Not knowing why, Perry felt tears coming. “Are you — are you going to process my papers?” He thought about his two children, then, in a way he hadn’t in decades.

“I warned you not to be so careless with it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t claim it.” Perry shot a puzzled glance backward. “Your one do-over,” said Death. “Most people need it for the second part of the test, and that’s why I told you to save it. But technically, you could use it whenever.” Death scratched at his bald scalp. Behind him, a prairie stretched out atop the cliff with a modern cottage a hundred feet back. Above it, there was a large billboard that read: EAT HERE. NOT THERE.

Death started doing elegant cartwheels near the edge of the cliff. “Yes. You can.”

“What do I have to do, then?” Hope warmed Perry’s chest.

Pausing his cartwheel, his legs in the air, Death said, “Do a full loop on that swing.”

“What?” Perry peered upward at the bar to which the chains attached. “But that’s … that’s impossible!” he said.

“You asked me what you had to do, and I told you,” said Death, who had begun doing handstand pushups. “Pump your legs, flap your arms, do what you need to make you and your seat flip over that bar.” Death popped back to his feet.

“And … and …” Perry tightened his clasp around the chains. “What if I don’t?”

Death sighed. “Asking yourself why and telling yourself why are the same expressions with different punctuation. Take some advice, Perry: Don’t get so caught up in grammar, all right?” Death stepped toward the edge of the cliff.

“Wait!” cried Perry, and Death did. “How long do I have?”

Death glanced at his wrist where a watch could have been. “As many hours in a day as any man. And don’t worry about the prior life.” Death glanced at his other naked wrist. “Back there, the EMTs are just arriving on your floor. Time’s a bit dilated here.” He pursed his lips as if to say more but instead uttered, “Good luck, Perry.” Then he jumped off the edge of the cliff and rocketed downward beyond sight.

The wind buffeted Perry in the squat man’s absence, and he clutched desperately to the chains. He couldn’t be sure if he was more afraid of falling or failing, but either way he was scared. And for a while, his hips beginning to hurt, his hands smelling like metal, he just sat there. Although the burn on the back of his hand still stung (and this staggering height was most unappealing), everything around him was really quite lovely. The soft glow of the sun, the swish of the grasses behind. And before he realized it, Perry was casually rocking forward and back. He still didn’t understand the purpose of the cottage and billboard, but then again, he really didn’t understand anything that was happening.

Overhead, the sun ticked through the sky, and in time (Perry having swung no higher than 45 degrees) dusk shaded the world pink. Not until now, then, did the anxiety bubble inside of his stomach. Every other minute, he had promised he would attempt the up-and-over. But every time he began, he convinced himself he still had more time.

But the day was almost over. And that was all the time Death had allotted.

Clenching his eyes, Perry began to work his legs outward, inward, outward, inward. But as he rose higher, there came an instant where he lifted out of his seat, and immediately, he slowed his pace. This was absurd! A silly dream children harbored. But the sun was weakening in its fight against the horizon, and soon, darkness would invade.

For some reason, Perry suddenly thought of his childhood dog. His parents had named her Daisy, but Perry always called her Madeline in secret. And because he was the one who spent the most time with her, eventually, she only responded to that.

Slapped back into his seat, Perry realized he had started pumping again. Vigorously. He kept thinking about Madeline — how she loved rides through the automated car wash; how she always looked at you before sneezing. And soon, Perry felt the blast of adrenaline, his body hovering parallel to the ground, his grip fierce around the chains, as he swung backward, ascending, rising until he stared nearly upside down at the cliff behind.

It was now.

With all the velocity he could charge, Perry gunned forward. He closed his eyes as he passed under the bar, soaring forward, upward. And as he felt himself become weightless, he peeked through his eyelids. He was above the bar. Thrill numbed his chest. He had —

Suddenly, his momentum collapsed, and instead of swinging back around, he fell from his seat. The wind gushed by his ears. His eyes rippled with water. He tried to scream, but the surging air smothered his voice. Twisting, rolling, he was helpless to do anything but continue falling. And falling. And falling.

Until he wasn’t.

When he blinked, he was standing on a colorfully lit game show stage.

“Now, who’s ready to play —” The host, Death, dressed in a tuxedo, turned the microphone toward the live studio audience who chanted: “Is. He. Living!”

Perry raised a hand to shield his eyes from the stabbing lights. He couldn’t be certain, but he believed the audience was a collection of literal ducks. And as they opened their beaks to quack, the sound of applause emanated.

“Today’s contestant is Perry J. Costa,” said Death. “Let’s give him a warm welcome, shall we?” All the ducks quacked their claps. “So Perry” — Death turned toward him — “are you ready to play Is He Living?” Still stunned, Perry just blinked stupidly. “Fantastic!” boomed Death. “Let’s get this started by ” — and his voice turned mysterious — “spinning the wheel.”

“W-what’s going on?” mumbled Perry, letting Death guide him toward the back of the stage. Multitudes of colorful light bulbs, like those outlining the featured attractions at old movie theaters, covered the wall. And in the middle of everything was a giant wheel divided in fifths, the numeric spans 0 – 10, 11 – 20, and so forth up to 41 – 50 emblazoned on the sections.

Perry repeated his confusion, but Death ignored him. “As you all know,” said Death, beaming at the audience, “Perry, here, will spin the wheel to select a particular decade of his life. When one’s been chosen, he will then list as many life achievements during that decade as he can. Each event will be awarded points by our three expert judges, and if Perry can score more than a hundred points for that decade, he gets a checkmark.” Above the wheel, there were five empty neon squares. “And if he can pass at least three out of five, he’ll be our grand winner!” The ducks applauded vociferously. “Are you ready?”

Perry gawked around the stage. “But I failed,” he said. “I fell.”

From the corner of his mouth, Death muttered, “You just had to make it over the bar, remember? I didn’t say you couldn’t fall.” Death resumed his persona. “Now it’s time to spin … the … wheel.”

Shakily, Perry raised his hands, the burn there still tingly, and he gave a pull. As it rattled, Perry appraised his reality — drowning in a pen? falling through the sky? a game show contestant? — but before any conclusion was reached, the wheel clicked slowly onto 21 – 30.

“One of my favorite decades!” announced Death. “Now are you ready, Perry?” The 48-year-old began to assemble those years in his memory. “And begin!” Above the wheel and neon squares, the number “15” appeared, counting down the seconds.

“Uh … I got married,” said Perry, his thoughts still a bit sticky. “I had two children. Donny and Mindy.” On the left side of the stage, a brawny woman, the co-hostess, hung slats on a board that listed Perry’s achievements as well as the points each received; right now, he had a total of 46. “I passed the insurance exam and started my career. I bought my first house. I bought my first car.” Those last two only received a combined 12 points. “I … I …” What else had he done? “My business trip in Canada. I graduated college. I —”

“And time!” said Death. “Let’s see what he got!”

The muscular hostess hung a panel with his total score, 103, and above the stage, a checkmark appeared in one of the neon boxes.

“Sneaked by with that one didn’t you, Perry?” The ducks quacked chuckles.

Perry strained to understand the scoring system as the woman emptied the board. A hundred and three points? That was it? At Death’s instruction, however, he gave the wheel another spin, and when it stopped, the audience oohed nervously.

“Ah,” said Death. “The dark years …” The wheel was on 11 – 20.

“The dark years?” said Perry. “That was —”

“And begin!”

Immediately, Perry clambered through his memory. There was his first kiss. His first dance. Graduation from high school. Honorable mention in the spelling bee. Perry tried to drag out more memories. Achievements! Think, think! But he kept returning to all the video games he had played, the Internet becoming prolific during that decade. And then of course, this was the era when Perry made his shower-time discovery of “self-stimulation.”

“And time!” said Death. Across the stage, the woman displayed the total: 74. “So close!” And a large X buzzed into one of the neon squares. “Two down, three to go. Give it another spin!” Perry wanted to protest — about what he didn’t know — but instead, simply did as directed and pulled the wheel. It landed on 0 – 10. Anxiously, he tugged on the ripples in his pants. What life achievements could he possibly have from that decade? And when Death commanded him to begin, he froze.

For a few moments, Perry said nothing. That was elementary school. Preschool. When he was a baby. But what life achievements could a baby possibly — “I learned to walk!” shouted Perry suddenly. “I learned to speak! I — I learned to write and play sports and run and read — I loved to read!” The audience cheered on his enthusiasm. “I created the game Lava Hop. In first grade, I climbed that tree no one else could. I got Madeline! I had my first ice cream. I kicked my first goal. I collected bugs and rocks and —”

“Time!” declared Death, grinning.

Perry’s score: 617.

“Wowza!” said Death. “What a round!” The swell of applause from the ducks agreed. “Though maybe you should’ve spread some of those points out, huh, Perry?” But Perry was so enraptured by the glow of those recollections that he didn’t hear Death, and without directive, he went ahead and spun the wheel again.

This time, it stopped on 31 – 40, and all the novel elation that had moments before magnetized Perry, dissipated. Thirty-three. That’s how old he’d been when Kayla left. Sitting on their living room sofa, their children visiting her sister, he’d watched her lips move, say things, make sounds. He only nodded. A menial employee agreeing to whatever his superior said.

“Are you ready, Perry?” This time, Death waited a moment. “We’ll start the clock when you begin.”

Perry stood there, running his lower lip between his teeth. “The divorce,” he said. “There was the divorce.” At the time, he had discounted her withdrawal. Her lessening. Everyone went through phases. “I started working more,” said Perry. Death looked to his co-hostess, but she only shrugged. “I sold my car,” said Perry. Really, though, it was just too frequent a reminder. “I ate out a lot.” On that couch, Kayla had said one thing that still barbed his thoughts before sleep: It’s like you’ve forgotten. Ironically, he couldn’t recall what she was referencing, but every day he’d ask himself, What if I’d just remembered?

“And time,” Death softly said. Beside the empty scoreboard, the woman stood with her hands in her pockets. “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” said Death, “that evens the count at two-two, only the final decade left.” The ducks shifted atop their seats. “Hey,” whispered Death, putting a hand in the middle of Perry’s back. “Even those who try to lay in the sun forever still get burnt.” Perry looked up. “You’ve got another round, you know; might as well make the best of it. Besides, when’s the next time you’ll get to play this game?”

Perry closed his eyes and began thinking. The most recent decade, these memories were the most plentiful, which also made them the most cumbersome to filter. “I got that gold watch from my company.” This co-hostess awarded meager points. “I — I started writing poetry. A little.” This one earned him more. “I joined that dating website. I bought a bike … though I haven’t really used it. Oh! I started learning French.” The audience’s energy was growing. “I … started cooking for myself. I joined that email thread for ballroom dancing. I went to the symphony and —”

“Time!” said Death. “What a round, what a round.” The audience chattered anxiously as the brawny hostess hung Perry’s total score. “Did he make it, folks?” And when the woman stepped back, she revealed the final tally: 82. “Oh, so close!” Death patted Perry on the shoulder. “You gave it a good run, friend, but in the end —”

“Wait!” said Perry, and the ducks’ consolatory applause trailed off. “Wait. I — I’m not 50 yet. This decade isn’t over.” Death gave him a curious look. “In two years, I learned to walk, speak, and dress myself. What’s to say I couldn’t do something similar with these next two?”

“Well, your trajectory indicates —”

“You don’t know that,” said Perry, finding himself out of breath. “You don’t.”

Death pondered these words. “I’ll have to consult with the judges.” He pressed a finger to his empty ear, nodding and mumbling. After a moment, however, he looked up. “The judges say we still have to count this decade.” The audience groaned. “However, because there are another two years left, they agreed that you could only be judged on what you’ve experienced. So as that’s 8 of the 10 years, you only have to reach 8/10 of the necessary 100 points, which in this case means you passed.”

Death grinned. Perry grinned. The crowd erupted with ovation. Taking Perry’s hand, Death raised it in the air; though, as he did, he pressed his thumb into the burn on the back of Perry’s hand. A fiery pain jagged through his arm, and immediately, the world went silent.

The ducks continued their clamor. Death voiced more congratulations. But to Perry, everything was infinitely mute. A soundproof door shut between him and the world. Death mouthed something to him, and Perry tried to express his inexplicable deafness, but his own vocal cords didn’t even rattle in his throat. Again, Death patted him on the shoulder, smiled, and then hopped down from the stage, walking around it and through a door beneath an illuminated EXIT sign. Alone now, even the voice inside of Perry’s head felt muffled, a heavy curtain severing his consciousness.

He staggered off the stage in the direction of Death. And as he lurched through that door, he caught himself on what seemed to be a bathroom sink.

His bathroom sink.

In front of him was that familiar, large mirror, his ghastly reflection looking more nauseated than he felt.

“Welcome to the third and final part,” said Death. He stood inside the mirror, a mahogany door on his left and right. But behind Perry there was just the olive green wall, the room’s only doors reflected in the mirror in front of him.

“The conclusion to this test may seem simple, but it’s not,” said Death. His voice sounded like it reverberated from every corner. “On my left” — he pulled open the door — “you can return to my office, and we’ll process your paperwork. On my right” — he closed the previous door and opened the other — “I can return you back to the line in front of my store.”

Perry forced himself to stand upright. On the counter was his frazzled toothbrush, while the soap had slipped into the sink. He scooped it back into its holder. The world on the other side of the mirror seemed brighter than the bathroom he stood in. “I don’t want to go back to your office,” said Perry.

Death nodded.

“But I don’t want to go back to that line either.” Perry pulled at his pants and Death waited for him to say more. “I mean, do I have to stand in line? Or can I — I don’t know, run around that parking lot or something till it’s my turn?”

Death wet his lips. The faintest smile escaped them. “Congratulations, Perry. You passed the final test.” At those words, it wasn’t simply relief that Perry felt. It was triumph.

Perry clenched the sides of his pants. “But you said …” he mumbled. “You said if I passed, I could—”

“If you passed in time.” Death straightened his glasses. “I am sorry.”

“You’re a liar,” uttered Perry. “You’re a cheat!”

“I respond to many names.”

“No,” said Perry. “No. I passed. You said I passed.”

“And you did.”

“Then put me back!” demanded Perry. “Please put me back.” There was an echo to his voice, those same tones used with Kayla. Anger. Pleading. “Please put me back there,” he said.

Death removed his glasses and pulled a cloth from his pocket. He took his time, wiping every contour of the lenses, before he slipped them back on. “I am never an answer,” said Death. “Only a reminder.” Then he tapped the outside of his pants pocket.

Perry paused. Then stuck his own hand into his pocket. A lighter and a lone cigarette. The two men exchanged gazes as Perry raised the roll of tobacco. Rasped the lighter. Pressed the flame to the end. After a moment, it crinkled red.

“Not everyone gets this opportunity,” said Death.

Perry stared at the lit end of the cigarette and shrugged. “Not everyone wants it.” Then he buried the smoldering tip onto his previous burn.

Screaming. Lots of screaming.

Then blackness.

Unlike before, Perry was immobile, the darkness implacable. Had Death tricked him? Was this the infinite blackness Perry had always imagined after dying? He tried to thrash, to move and kick and bite, but every part of him felt so weak.

Then he heard it. Voices.

A zipper undid loudly above him and the interior lights of an ambulance flooded his eyes.

]]>Zelda, Burninghttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/zelda-burning.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/zelda-burning.html#commentsWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=112821Winner of the 2016 Great American Fiction Contest: At Highland Hospital, Zelda Fitzgerald found refuge from the world — but not from Scott.

How is it that she’s come to this? From flapper to frump, sitting here in an oversized sweater, the color of cerulean blue, her hair a frowsy tangle — though just now she doesn’t care about that. There’s sun in her chest that’s pushing out through her limbs. She’s still. Warm.

She knows this place, this white windowless office, is not where she belongs. But she’s not sure where it is that she does.

From behind his desk, Dr. Carroll is asking her another question, as Zelda, stretched out on the couch, gazes out the window, seeing sunlight slice through gray.

Scott is there, but Dr. Carroll doesn’t see him — isn’t it strange, with his presence so clear? He’s to her right, slouched in a chair, squinting from the light. He’s silent but she can tell he’s judging her thoughts.

She stares over at him, questions in her eyes, but his face is a wall she keeps coming up against.

Dr. Carroll never quits, prodding and poking.

“Excuse me?” Zelda asks.

“I was asking if you’d care to talk more about your childhood — your parents, for example?”

“Not particularly, doctor. But if you insist, I’ll do my best.” She bats her eyes at the good doctor. Such a proud and puffy little man.

“Yes, Zelda. Tell me about your father.”

She lights a cigarette. “My father was a judge, Old Dick we all called him. He never really approved of me.” She rushes on, breathlessly, “Scott always remembers him chasing me around the table with a carving knife that time at dinner. But really he wasn’t as bad as all that.”

Scott is still slouched in the chair to her right, his hand curved toward him, inspecting his nails. So strange how the doctor never even glances his way.
The doctor’s face flushes in alarm. “Your father chased you with a carving knife? Why do you think that was, Zelda?”

Zelda laughs, waving her hand in dismissal. “Oh, who knows? I was probably being sassy. It was right after Scott and I were married, so I ’spect we were all getting used to things. Don’t worry, Doctor. Father knew I was a fast runner.”

She can tell that sometimes the doctor doesn’t know whether she is fibbing or not. Honestly, there are moments when she isn’t sure herself.

“I suppose you want to know about how he was when I was growing up, that sort of thing?” She flicks the ash from her cigarette into the brass tray.

“Yes, Zelda. That would be fine.” Dr. Carroll runs his fingers through the little hair he has left, then adjusts his glasses and straightens in his chair.

“Well, he mostly stayed out of the way, too busy with work, you know, which was fine by Mother and me.”

She closes her eyes and she is there again: a small child in a white sundress, golden hair glinting in the sun, running through the field of yellow daisies. She smells the bright new grass and onion weeds blended with clover. Her mother sits in the shade on a white, paint-chipped bench, fanning herself and reading Harper’s.

“Look how fast I can run, Mother.”

“Yes, darling. You certainly can.”

Read all six winning stories from The 2016 Great American Fiction Contest

“I can beat the boys.” She runs and runs straight through the field, faster and faster until she tastes the sweat on her upper lip and the wind cuts deep down in her throat. Throwing herself into the tall weeds, she rests for a minute. Her mother, used to toting Zelda home covered in grass stains and bruises, never minds in the least if she gets dirty. Zelda’s days consist of doing exactly what she wants, when she wants. Swimming and diving, those she adores — darting into the water like a tiny exotic fish racing through the blue of the pool, water pulsing in and out of her ears. And then some days, after she’s beaten the boys in that, too, they bicycle or roller skate home and Mother has warm cookies and lemonade for all. At night she catches fireflies with the boys and falls asleep to the smell of the pear trees in their yard.

“Zelda.” A voice like her father’s calls to her, but she’s not ready to go back home yet.

“No. I’m with Mother now. I still want to pick flowers.”

“Zelda.” It is Dr. Carroll. “You are drifting away again. Remember how we discussed the importance of focusing, of staying in the world of the real?”

Scott is sitting straight up in the chair now, staring across at her, as if he is waiting too.

“But Doctor, the fantasy world is so much nicer.”

She has been a good girl, even helping those patients who need assistance in exercise and dance, and so has earned a hike in the steamy late afternoon near Sunset Mountain with Dr. Carroll’s assistant Landon. The rain begins to thump down on her head, but Zelda does not mind; she is thrilled to be outdoors, comforted by the dank, dark woods.

“Let’s make a fire,” she suggests, and begins rifling through the bark and briar patches, choosing pieces of kindling.

Hypnotized by this fire, Zelda thinks of others. There were the sharp smells of burning eucalyptus from fires behind the beaches on the Riviera. Those were happy times, with her French aviator — his strong body lying next to hers as they watched the sun set, smelling the cool breeze from the ocean, the smoky sharp scent that made her feel so alive … then there were the fires that she had set in rage, whenever Scott had hurt her, or whenever she simply needed the closure that comes with flames — igniting her clothes in an old fireplace (nearly burning down the house in La Paix in the process), or in an old bathtub when Scott was on the prowl.

Walking back home in the dusk, Zelda looks ahead to the moon glowering over the mountain trees in the direction of the Grove Park Inn. She thinks for an instant of when she stayed there with Scott for their wild honeymoon and all the other times they stayed there as lovers and partners in fun. They were excitement eaters in those days — riding around on the tops of taxicabs, coming in at 3 a.m. They made a picture, the two of them — better than movie stars.

As the hospital comes into view, Zelda notices something she hasn’t before — a gray stone well on her right. There’s something mysterious about it, spooky. As she approaches, from deep down below, a voice calls to her.

“This way we can have some privacy, baby. Come on and jump. There’s a golden kingdom that goes through from here — all to way to China!”

Zelda moves closer to his voice, but just as suddenly, arms grab at her, pulling her back, back, back. She struggles and screams, lashing out against them, but they still carry her, fighting, away.

She’s not altogether sure how she came to be here, sitting on the sofa in this bright white room. Dr. Carroll looks at her from over his glasses.

“Tell me, Zelda: What do you remember about your hiking trip yesterday?”

Zelda sits dazed. A couple of minutes pass. “I had the chance to be with him, Doctor. That man pulled me away. You’re all trying to keep us apart.”

Dr. Carroll draws his eyebrows together, making one long caterpillar of them. “Trying to keep whom apart, Zelda?”

“Me and Scott.”

Dr. Carroll looks weary. “Zelda, you know Scott died a few years ago.”

But Scott will never die, she knows. Why just the other day, when she was out visiting friends, he sat right beside her at the dinner table and told her the train would depart late, and sure enough, it was a good 30 minutes behind schedule. Her Princeton man. The King of Roses. He’d pursued her when she was just a girl, just a beautiful girl in a frothy tulle dress. How jealous the other girls were of her, how envious her boyfriends were of him. Right up until the very last minute she’d kept them all guessing whom she’d choose. She recalls standing around at the pool, the evening before her marriage to Scott, dressed in her flesh-colored swimsuit (rumors quickly spread that she’d been naked). Spinning around, eyes closed, arm outstretched and finger pointing, she’d taunted, “Whoever I stop on, that’s who I’ll marry.” The boys scrambled around to have a better chance of being chosen.

Dr. Carroll clears his throat, pulling her back. Zelda has noticed that he has an annoying little habit of doing this when she drifts.

“Let’s talk about your paintings, Zelda. They’re very impressive. Tell me about this one.” He holds up a watercolor of a naked woman lying fallen on stone steps. Underneath her hips and legs are gold coins. Ornate gold pots stand tall beside her. In the shadowed corner, a gray phantom figure dressed in brown holds a jar containing large white moths that exit and fly into the space. An amber city gleams through the archway in the background.

“Oh, that’s from a parable Jesus taught his followers: ‘Do not store up treasures on earth.’”

“I see. Zelda, why is it that the hands in all of your paintings, this one included, are so large in proportion to the bodies? They seem slightly disfigured — overpowering and grasping.”

Zelda turns her head, considering the painting for a few seconds.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Doctor. I’m just not that good with hands.”

She believes that the things she sees in the clouds are hers alone — no one else can pinpoint the Degas dancers tying their point shoes, or see the faces of zinnias, the tufts of the beard of Moses, the snowsuit-padded child zooming down the hill on a sled, and other scenes — the backs of knees, for instance, or the intertwined bodies of lovers — that are not polite to mention, but that she mentions nonetheless, whenever she has the chance to leave listeners in stunned and open-mouthed silence. Zelda knows, by intuition, that, say what they may, no one can give life to these shapes better than she.

Earlier that afternoon she lay alone in the grass just beyond the hospital, staring up at the clouds. Scott had been there briefly, sitting to her right, arms wrapped around his knees. Writing in his leather-bound journal — the one she smelled even when he wasn’t around. He’d look up from time to time, but his thoughts were on his work, not on the sky. Finally, he’d gotten up and wandered dreamily up the hill, journal in his back pocket, leaving her alone.

Now, in the spacious wooden-floored room devoted to arts and exercise, Zelda works at her easel. She always chooses to set up in front of the window that has the best light, and today it is the one in the left-hand corner, where the sun’s rays stream down like warm honey from behind the clouds and through the large glass panes. On her palette, she mixes the different shades of browns and pinks. The smell of the oil paint stings her nose and provokes in her a heightened sense of awareness. As she mixes, Zelda sees from out of the corner of her eye a patient meandering towards her. The woman appears to be, like Zelda, in her 40s. She has left the group of men and women at the craft table at the far end of the room and comes to stand beside Zelda. The patient’s hair is unkempt and she sucks her thumb, drool running from the corners of her mouth. Her clothes sag and hang, and she stares blankly at the canvas.

The woman takes her thumb out of her mouth. “Whatcha gonna paint there?”

“Ballet dancers.” It is a painting of two Picasso-esque figures, male and female, and Zelda, ignoring the intrusion, turns to her canvas and blends brown paint, shadowing the woman figure’s outstretched arm. Both dancers are naked, with the exception of the pink ballet slippers the female wears. In her hands are the tutus she has discarded — a white one in the outstretched hand, a pink one in the left. The woman stands over the man who is facing backwards with arm curved over his head, crouched under the female’s arm as if being banished. The two figures’ features blur together and the legs, arms, and hands are stretched out of all proportion, for this is how dancers feel after dancing.

As Zelda uses her fine-point brush to outline and shade the female dancer’s limbs, she reflects back to her days of intense training at Madame Egorova’s studio. How Madame’s presence infused life — that luminous chandelier-brilliance of beauty and hope — into Zelda! How her manic days of practice at home — her work at the barre and mirror she had installed into her and Scott’s apartment at which she worked nonstop, even talking to friends who came to visit them as she rehearsed — were well-worth a single word of praise from the tall, dark-haired, brilliant Madame Egorova with whom she was a little bit in love. And dancing itself stretched her muscles, her mind, her soul. It seemed to her then that only through daily disciplined movement could she beat back the demons.

“Third-rate.”

Zelda whips around, startled that the voice is not the patient’s, but Scott’s. He is dressed in a relaxed suit and tie and wears his hat at an angle. Leaning, one leg crossed over the other, on a wooden column, he smokes a cigarette and observes her painting.

“You’re a third-rate artist, Zelda, just like you were a third-rate dancer, and writer, for that matter.” He blows the smoke through his mouth and nose, his eyes boring into hers.

“Scott, please. You’re not supposed to be here. You’ll get me into trouble again, and then they won’t let me out to see Mother. Let me paint. This is all I have left.” Hands trembling, she returns to the dark brown floors of the stage, a space that does not require particular steadiness.

He sneers, “Save Me the Waltz. I can’t believe you had the audacity to publish it. Taking my material like that.”

Zelda spins around to face him. “Your material? It was both of our lives, wasn’t it? You talk about audacity after rifling my journal, after lifting my own words from my letters to you and you alone for your stories and novels? Go away!”

He disappears and in his place stands the female patient, still sucking her thumb. But now her eyes are large and she moans as if she might break out in frightened sobs. The nurse in charge of the crafts table hurries to the scene. “Zelda, is something the matter?”

The patient runs forward, turning away from Zelda and clinging to the nurse.

“No ma’am, but this woman is disturbing my concentration. Would you please escort her back to the table?”

As the nurse shepherds the patient back to her fold, Zelda cleans her brush and dips it into the dark pink paint, refocusing her attention on the creases of the tutu and the ballerina slippers.

She wants to stick out her tongue at the world. She’s always had the impulse, ever since she was a child, and that’s how she feels at this moment, at age 47, now that she’s out of that wretched hospital at last, puttering away in her mother’s garden, digging up clods of dirt with her trowel. Raking her fingers through the earth, breathing in the rich dark soil, she feels the sun’s rays begin to heal her tired body. When she first came there was one lonely jonquil outside her bedroom window, but now, she looks proudly at all she has planted — crocus, jasmine, lilies, larkspur, phlox, marguerites. Lifting her face to the sky, she sees dark, menacing clouds moving closer and she smells the oncoming rain.

Though it is March and springtime, the evenings are cool and she and Mother still make fires in the hearth. Zelda can sit for hours, just staring into the fire, imagining in the orange and blue flames the shapes and faces that meld together in her dreams.

The next day, after a lunch of fried chicken and mashed potatoes with her mother, Zelda, in unusually good spirits, decides to walk to town to see a painting in a gallery she read about in the paper.

“Be careful, Zelda,” her mother calls to her as she heads out the door.

“Really, Mother, it’s fine. I believe I’m finally getting better.” Dressed in a dark green velvet gown, purple scarf, and black bucket hat, Zelda sets off. The air is crisp and clean after last night’s rain, and the wind refreshes and lifts her spirit.

Rounding the corner a couple of blocks from her house, she spots two young boys sitting on their bicycles talking. Zelda thinks how adorable they are in their coats and caps and remembers how she would dress little Scottie in her jacket and boots before she went out to play.

As she passes by the pair, she overhears one say to the other, “Hey, Jack. Look! That’s the woman my ma said was talking to herself and yelling at imaginary folks in the street the other day.”

Zelda increases her pace until she is safely out of earshot and then slumps onto the steps of a vacant apartment, her eyes stinging. She didn’t know she had been yelling, only communicating. How many people had seen her? Did her mother know? Wrapping her scarf tighter around her face, she returns home by a different route.

Back she goes to Highland Hospital, in spite of her good intentions to be well. Although the stone walls and antiseptic smells oppress her, she has come to look on this place as a refuge from the world’s expectations of sanity. In a tiny white room on the wing of the first floor, the nurse, a girl — young, lovely, but with a bit of the pinched, hassled look about her — is giving her an injection. Zelda is not sure what it is, but silently submits, desirous to be left alone with her thoughts.

“Goodnight, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” the girl says.

Zelda simply looks at her.

Left alone, she feels restless. Flopping like a fish in her bed, she wonders abstractly if anyone is surprised she is back here. She certainly isn’t. Zelda remembers telling her mother, just before she got in the car to be taken back to the cool air of Asheville, “Don’t worry, Mother. I’m not afraid to die.” And she is not. She thinks of death as all pure and white and golden, where she eats honeydew melon and drinks dope with boys who once again adore her.

Out of the darkness she sees a section of light under her door and a voice calls to her, “Zelda. Zelda!” He has come for her at last. They told her he was gone, but she knew he would come for her.

“I’m coming, Scott! Hang on.” Just like him, when he was tight — yelling like that, loud enough to wake up the whole place. This time, she determines to appear very glamorous when she meets him. No more crazy old woman. Oh, no. Searching through her closet, she finds a short black dress with a fringe at the bottom. She pulls out her string of beads and straps on her black heels. Oh, where is all this coming from? But she doesn’t care, she is happy. Finding a mirror under her bed (somehow she knows just where to look) and some mascara and rouge and red lipstick too, she puts on her Elizabeth Arden face. That nurse has more gumption than she’d imagined, leaving all these tokens behind for Zelda to find. And now she sees that some kind soul (Dr. Carroll?) has tucked away a small gift for her, and opening the box she takes out the most adorable little black cap, just what the outfit needs. Pulling it on, she rushes out the door.

And then she hears the music — Ivie Anderson singing with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. She would have to talk to Scott about them. And God and other important things that he might not have considered. But no time for that now. She must go and meet him, and then he is there — just like the first time she met him back in Montgomery, Alabama, when she was 18. He is beautiful in his tawny golden suit, white shirt, and black-with-gold-striped tie underneath, his hair combed back and his gray eyes holding hers, and she runs right up and throws her arms around him and kisses him. Duke and Ivie are swinging to “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.”

“Hey, Baby. I sure have missed you.” Zelda lowers her chin and cuts her eyes up at him, her lips curling in a sultry smile. It’s smoky in here. The horns blare loudly, but it is just how they like it. The lights and music don’t faze two lovers who want to shine for one another. And they do sparkle, swinging to the syncopation of the sound.

Doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah, wah-wah.

Magically, Scott has improved since their last dance so long ago. He knows all the steps, but it’s Zelda who causes everyone to turn and stare. They can’t keep their eyes off her stylish flair, her sense of rhythm. Scott pulls her close to him, closer than ever before, cheeks touching, one body, then swings her over and around, then turning for them to Charleston with the group and then back to Zelda.

And then Zelda breaks away. She feels the beat of the drums way down in her body, and she wants a solo. Pulling up her dress to her hips, she shakes her fanny in perfect double-time rhythm. Everyone stands back to watch, amazed, as always, by her verve and courage. She doesn’t care what they think — she knows that every inch of her is moving in time to the music — that she is the music and the energy and the pulse of nighttime. The spotlight is on her and she twirls, her skirt swinging out, and she comes to one corner of the room where she sees Dr. Carroll sitting on a stool snapping his fingers and bobbing his head from side to side. He smiles up at her and tries to tell her something, some word of admiration, but she can’t be bothered with anyone else’s rhythm; she has her own.

Fingers stretched tight, hands flittering, legs hopping and kicking first front and back and out and turn. She spins and spins until she comes to the next corner, where sits a man in a chair. But instead of looking at her like a loon as he usually does, he, too, is smiling and nodding along. She sees him pull out a notebook, look back up at her in approval, then glance down again and write a line or two. Let him write — let him tell Scott ugly things about her — she doesn’t care this night. This is her dance. She is not Nicole Diver or Daisy Buchanan or any other girl in Scott’s stories — or maybe she’s all of them, yes, she’s all of them, but more, more more, because she’s Zelda Sayre.

One hand on hip and swinging her beads with the other, she scissor-steps a little ways across and finds another familiar face.

“Do you remember me, my southern beauty? We had such fun on the Riviera!” He is still in tip-top shape, young and bronze, with the same jet-black hair. They had been quite cozy that summer when Scott was too busy to be with her. At the time it had broken her little heart, but now all she can concentrate on is the blissfulness of her dance. And then, as she nears the next corner, there sits her father, the judge. She gives her best smile and dances harder and harder, faster and faster. Shimmy-shimmy-push-pull, back together front. The steps come to her automatically — her body dictates and throbs with the slightest nuance of the singer’s voice, or the trumpet or sax. Zelda jumps up on a chair, then onto the nearby table. Her entire body vibrates and all the spectators blur together.

The song is nearly over. In need of a grand finale, Zelda jumps off the table and onto the floor. Once she hits, she crouches in a frozen pose for a couple of beats, then spins around on one leg, then raises her arms above her head and clasps her hands.

Doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah, wah-wah.

Arms fanning out, legs kicking behind, she twirls towards Scott, stopping arm’s length away from him. With hip jerked to one side, Zelda reaches into his pocket, where she knows she’ll find cigarettes. Taking one from the case, and dramatically placing it between her lips, she thrusts her chin out for him to light it. With a grin, he obliges, and tapping her foot to the rhythm, Zelda puffs brilliant circles of smoke and then tosses her cigarette into the frenzied crowd.

And then this is the most spectacular effect she has ever had. Scott, the darling, must have ordered it for her. The fire starts just beside Scott, close to Dr. Carroll’s seat, and then spreads slowly slowly around the room, around the room, as she dances and swirls and smiles. She feels the heat, but it just makes her dance faster and faster, the fire creeping up the walls, the flames licking and beating down the cabinets and tables. And no one seems much to mind, for Zelda is dancing her heart out, she’s never danced like this before, and soon the two hands of fire join together and the circle is complete. She’s dancing in a ring of fire and twirling and twirling and twirling and rushing around and around and round. And she thinks as she dances, This is the end. Scott will love this ending. Something in her pauses, and she wonders, Will he? Will he love this ending? Will it be the ending he wants? And then the notion quivers and snaps, for she thinks, It’s my own ending this time, and a damn good one.

—Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1900. She married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920. In 1930 she suffered her first mental breakdown and was shortly after diagnosed with schizophrenia. Not only was Zelda a gifted writer, publishing her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, in 1932, she was also a talented dancer and painter. In 1948, she, along with eight other patients, died in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.
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]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/zelda-burning.html/feed1The Magic Circlehttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/the-magic-circle.html
Mon, 28 Dec 2015 15:00:39 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113029First runner-up in the 2016 Great American Fiction Contest: On a fall night in 1963, a young immigrant struggles to support his family and hold on to a dream.

]]>Peering out at the view through the cracked eye, I see Water Street in all its glory. It may be 2 a.m. but cars still cruise to and from the river, their meeting place, the bushes at Curry Corner, where everything from drugs and bodies to stolen TVs can be exchanged for cash. I hear Spanish music blaring from the Mofongo Bar & Grill a few doors down. A car horn blasts — two long, two short. Someone screams, “I see you, don’t think you can hide!” A fall night in 1963 in Darktown, the armpit of Winterville, the armpit of New Jersey, the armpit of America. And here we are, all the way from Morocco to the corner of Water and Limestone, the Elmalehs and their restaurant, the Couscous Caboose. Fourteen succulent varieties of couscous cooked by Lili Elmaleh, and jazz performed by Danny Elmaleh and The Magic Circle.

She shakes her head, a cloud of soft dark curls. Like me, can’t sleep. “Tell me a story, Daddy.”

I set down my trumpet on the stand on the small stage and follow her upstairs. I confess: Sophie can maneuver me wherever she wants me. Far shrewder, smarter, prettier than any adult I know, she wants to be a detective and singer for my band. “That will be my cover,” she tells me solemnly. “While I’m singing, I’ll watch people and no one will know that I’m solving mysteries.”

Solving me, baby. I know.

Last night I drove her and Memphis to the Winterville Autumn Fair and left them alone for an hour. One hour, that’s all. I gave them money to buy snacks and to play games. I knew Memphis would go right for the funnel cake — something like Lili’s beignets, smothered in powdered sugar — and Sophie for the fried-potato-and-cheese pierogies. Lili had made me swear I wouldn’t leave them alone, but I knew in my gut they’d be okay.

When I met them an hour later in front of 4-H Hall, where proud farmers displayed huge prize-winning pigs and pumpkins, Sophie was grim, eyebrows raised high and lips tight — a miniature Lili — and Memphis was in 11-year-old boy heaven, mouth smeared with chocolate and powdered sugar. I couldn’t figure out why Sophie was so mad. She couldn’t have seen anything. I let her grab my hand in her small firm grip and lead me and Memphis back into the fair.

“Sophie, we have to go home.”

“I want to show you something first.”

Memphis’s sticky hand nestled trustingly in mine. “Did you have a good time?” I asked him.

He nodded, golden-brown corkscrew curls bouncing. “Except for Sophie bossing me and not letting me play the birthday guessing game and calling me Ned. I hate when she calls me that!”

I grinned at his woeful face. Not only did Sophie insist we call her “Nancy,” but she called Lili “Hannah,” Memphis “Ned Nickerson,” and me “Carson.” I often felt her critical eye on me. “If you’d only cut your hair, wear shoes, and get a job as a lawyer, you’d be just like Carson Drew.”

It was a fall night, and the moon shone orange, bright as one of the prize-winning giant pumpkins. Sullen teens walked by in the fiery light, mothers wheeled strollers. We passed farmers with mottled skin and chin beards, and enormous women, hair tightly pulled back in hairnets, who sold rounds of pale farm cheese, twisted pretzels, and foaming blue birch beer. Bikers in sleeveless black leather swaggered. The smells tempted me, and I suddenly realized I was hungry. Burnt sugar, dark molasses shoofly pie, frying pierogies, sweet apple dumplings, hot corn pies, and funnel cakes.

Sophie stopped hard in front of an enclosed area illuminated with spotlights. A sign announced:

Amish Wedding!
See How the Plain People Get Hitched!
Shows Every Hour on the Hour!

About 20 people had gathered in front of a huge green chair that rose 10 feet in the air on long stilt legs. A young couple, about 20 or so, mounted the stepladder to the chair. They turned and smiled down at the small crowd. The guy recited something, but people’s shouts drowned out his words. I stared from his scuffed work boots to the round black hat tilted back on his head. The girl, a pale redhead with a dimpled smile, wore a white bonnet and apron over an ankle-length blue-and-white checked dress, dirty sneakers peeking from under the hem.

Read all six winning stories from The 2016 Great American Fiction Contest

She yelled, “I, Sarah, promise to honor and obey you, Samuel! I promise to work for you! To keep your house clean, to cook for you and raise your children! To mend your clothes when they’re torn! To be true to you and to God! Not to think wicked thoughts about other men, and to be satisfied with my life with you! For as long as I shall live!”

Oh, so that’s what this was about. Sophie watched me ferociously, willing me to absorb the vows. People clapped and whistled. Someone cried, “Show us how the Amish do it!” Sophie squeezed my hand until I finally looked down and met her enormous eyes — so much like Lili’s — black-and-silver swirls, like rain. I used to call Lili my rain girl.

We stared at each other silently. Dissected, judged, and found wanting by my daughter. The Amish boy shouted out his vows. Memphis’ hand was warm and sweet in mine. She knows, I thought. I have no idea how, but she knows. I broke away from the staring contest first.

The newly married couple climbed down the stepladder to ride away in a black horse and buggy. As the girl entered the buggy, she glanced back over her shoulder and smiled faintly. She could have been smiling at Sophie as well as at me, but Sophie shot me an accusing look. “Okay,” I said brightly. “Who wants ice cream?”

Memphis raised his hand as if he were in school. We stopped at the ice cream stand, and I ordered three soft vanilla-and-chocolate swirled cones, with orange and black sprinkles for Halloween. I sensed Sophie’s moral dilemma. She struggled mightily at my side, not wanting to accept a bribe from one she considered a sinner. I held her cone in one hand while licking my own. I did not glance at her, but I suffered with her, and when she held out her hand in defeat, I immediately gave her the cone. We ate the ice cream as we walked back to the hill where the cars were parked. I marveled each time I saw the silver-and-white ’57 Chevy, its silver fins like wings. The first car I’d ever owned. If business at the Couscous Caboose didn’t pick up, it would be the last.

“You parked in a different place,” said Sophie. Her voice was resigned. Memphis licked his ice cream in painstakingly exact circles to ensure that some remained in the cone for a final triumphant bite.

Instead of fighting Memphis to sit in the front seat next to me, she got in back. I turned on the radio. My luck, it was the Singing Nun, shrilling “Dominique, nique, nique.” Sophie’s eyes in the rearview, twin flames of righteousness, held the Nun’s song as further proof of my lowness. I turned off the radio, and we drove home without saying a word. I parked in the alley next to the dumpster. Memphis said shyly, “Thanks, Dad,” and ran inside to tell Lili about his adventures.

I thought briefly of lying, and then figured it would be less trouble to tell the truth. “Yes.”

“Why?”

We’d hit the heart. She’d been playing with me till now. “I saw her at the fair, and she needed a ride home.”

“Why?”

Saints Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, help me improvise a way out of this. “She was feeling sick.”

“Why did she ask you?”

Good question. I cleared my throat. “We ran into each other.”

“How did she get to the fair if she needed a ride home?”

“She had her car, but she didn’t feel well enough to drive home. She’ll pick up her car tomorrow.”

She considered. My heart was beating fast. The absurdity of being cross-examined by a 13-year-old did not strike me. Sophie was no ordinary 13-year-old. When she announced one morning, “I’m going to solve the world,” I believed her. “Why did Millie sit in the backseat?” she asked.

“Why did you?” It was weak, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

I felt her contempt. A long silence followed. Long enough to make me feel like the lowest of the low, and to wish I could rewind the night, and backtrack to Lili kissing me good-bye and making me promise to stay with the kids and not get distracted, and herding them outside, and not stopping to look in the dining room where Millie sat alone at a table, curling a glossy strand around her finger, and smiling when she saw me, smiling as if she’d been waiting for me.

Let me backtrack. It began a few nights ago. After a hot set, I lowered the trumpet, wiped the sweat from my face and blinked, returning to the real world. The Darktown-world, where clocks ticked, Lili scolded, kids needed winter clothes and dentist appointments, I punched in my timecard at the A&P and hung up on bill collectors, or most shameful of all, let Sophie and Memphis answer, with their smooth American accents. The opposite of the song-world, where instead of running from the dark, I ran towards it, blowing back and forth between Morocco and America, Jewish kid to father, musician to husband, crashing sea to stinking brown river, all merging inside me, pulsing through my throat and fingers. The song I played had no end.

As soon as I left the stage, Millie cornered me. “I have to have you now. This minute.”

Still dazed, I shook my head. She gestured towards the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. “I’ve been coming here for weeks, watching you. I know you’re married. I don’t care. That’s forever-time. I have a husband in forever-time too. But this is now. Like the music. You and me. This minute. That’s all that really matters.”

She saw in my eyes that I understood. This was one of the main lessons I learned during the war: the difference between forever-time and now-time. I learned to live in the now. On stage, blowing, communing with my musicians. Asking questions with my horn that they slammed back at me with the piano, bass, drums, and trumpet. The rest of life — eating, sleeping, drinking, talking — was what I had to get through to return to the now, when the clock stopped ticking, and life became its promise, and I did what I was meant to do. My dream was to live in an eternity of now. A dream that was dying a fast death in Darktown. But I had never followed the dream out of the song.

Until now.

The clock ticked, ticked through the car, harder and faster than a heart. Sophie opened the car door but didn’t get out. The river smelled like ripe black olives, pungent as argan oil from Mogador.

“Don’t do it again, Daddy. It will hurt Mommy.” She closed the car door quietly behind her.

I come to with a jerk and sit up. The sun is gone. My trumpet teacher, Prosper’s voice is gruff in my ear, You’ve lost the beat, my boy, you’ve lost the beat. My feet are icy. I lie on my stomach and creep forward like an alligator, until my face hovers over the water. My city is reflected below. Glittering and wavering towers and castles, the street of blue torches, pink cobblestones, vivid sardine boats shaking with the force of the waves, the white roof I ran across to escape my father’s belt, the one I toppled from and broke my nose. I search the city till I find him. Standing on the fortress wall, trembling with rage. He points his finger at the sea and screams. The sound ripples like a stone, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I lean over farther until my nose touches the cold, dark water. He sees me and spits in my face.

That old song, “The Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” could have been written for Halloween night. Lili and I sit on the front step, the basket of candy bars between us. She slaps my hand when I steal one, but I feed her half. Hershey bars are still a marvel to me, brown-and-silver packets tossed at us from smiling American soldiers on Liberation Day in Casablanca. We watch the parade of ghosts, goblins, witches, horned devils trailed by parents … the three old men on Chico’s bench in front of the barbershop across the street, handing out lollipops between guzzles from their paper bags … the drunks out in full force, huddling in doorways and sitting on the stoop of the No Name Bar … shouts of laughter and eerie cries.

Next door, Mrs. Krapp hands out Hall’s cough drops, one by one. Last year she kept her house dark. Rumor is she hides razor blades in apples. I believe it — her razor eyes slice me when I walk up and down the street.

At the foot of the street is Curry Corner, edging to the river. In Mahendroo Wash & Dry, Naveen and his cousin, Mr. Singh, play backgammon while waiting for clothes to dry. Sheets and towels come out smelling faintly of curry. Chico told me, “We’ve got the whole world here: India at the foot, Africa at the head, Puerto Rican hips, and a few Polacks and Russians — Anna Bolotovsky’s bra — in the chest.”

The first Halloween Lili baked walnut cookies, marzipan sweets, and delicate flaky fadzwellos dripping orange syrup. The masked and costumed kids looked puzzled, shook their heads, and withdrew. Later, the manager of the Mofongo Bar & Grill explained to a hurt Lili: “Too many crazy people, like Mrs. Krapp and the old lady on the corner of Ridge who bakes poisoned cookies. Parents warn their kids not to accept anything that’s not sealed.”

Like the A&P. Aisle after aisle of sterile sealed cans and boxes, no smell — except in Meats and Produce. Peas, beets, corn, beans identified only by the pictures glued to the cans. A food hospital. No vendors shouting the glories of their wares, no customers tasting and bargaining, no music. Only the ringing of the cash register, the stacking and sorting and sweeping to get rid of any crumb, any clue that there is food in this place. I do my best to rearrange the produce and fruit, creating tapestries of color and texture … until Sid, the manager, sees what I’ve done and yells, “What are you doing, Frenchie? You outa your mind?”

Lili’s mad at me tonight. Again. I came home late, forgot I was supposed to take Memphis to the dentist. She had to send Carlos, my drummer, with him. And wasn’t I supposed to pay the electric bill? We got another call threatening to shut off the lights and heat. And if I think this heater is going to survive another winter, I’ve lost my mind. Instead of waiting until the middle of a snowstorm when it will surely break down, wouldn’t it make sense to take care of it now?

I don’t answer, don’t talk. I sit next to her, holding up the basket while fairy princesses and cowboys trip up the steps to us. The night air is still warm, a gift of summer spilling over. The moon, an orange pumpkin, perfect for Halloween. I smell chocolate and spilled beer. Curry wafting up Water Street, and cilantro and cinnamon coming from inside. And fumes shooting from the factories in Elizabeth across the bridge to us. The train whistles, like a foghorn, blowing a warning. No, I didn’t write this song, but tonight it sings to me. Tonight I feel part of it. Or it feels part of me. I have lost the beat. I know I have. My trumpet sits on its stand in the music corner in the dining room. Waiting. For what? For me to wake up, grab it and run out of here. If I do, where will I go? The city, of course. A phone number burns through my pocket to my thigh. Woody the piano player told me to call him when I move to New York. “It’s only a matter of time,” he said. “A player with your ear and your sound.”

My ear. My sound. I don’t trust my ear anymore. And what is my sound? If I still have one, I don’t recognize it.

“Trick or treat!” A group of suspiciously tall kids march up the steps. A hard voice demands, “Treats!”

“Who’s that?” I ask. “Aren’t you a little old?”

A masked cowboy with distinct whiskey breath leans in my face. “Aren’t you a little old?”

“Hey! Who the hell are you?”

“Relax, Danny. It’s just me. Tommy Garello.”

A year older than Sophie, but the kid looks 18, and as sullen as his father, Mike. Lili mutely holds out the basket. Tommy and his gang grab half the candies. With a yelp, they leap down the steps. On the sidewalk, Tommy turns back. “Hey Danny, next time get the ones with almonds. Haha!”

Haha, Garello. I know Lili is remembering when we first arrived in America, and Tommy asked her if Memphis could go out with him and shoot streetlights with BB guns. Four years ago. That year I took Sophie and Memphis door to door. She was a ballerina, shivering in her pink tutu and tights, but too stubborn to wear a coat. Memphis was a doctor, in a white coat, a plastic stethoscope around his neck. I wore a jeweled caftan that had belonged to Lili’s brother, maroon tasseled fez on my head, and pointed yellow babouches on my feet. Sophie thought I was the Black Sultan, the bandit hero of the tales I tell them.

From the cracked sidewalk I watched them climb the concrete steps and go to each redbrick apartment building and ring the doorbell. When the door opened, they held out their bags. Sometimes they were invited inside, and I watched them through the lighted window as if they were on TV. Standing in the dark, looking into the gold-lit windows, brought me back to 1943, when I ran away to Casablanca. I wandered the streets, staring hungrily into illuminated windows and open doorways, melting into the shadows whenever an officer or policeman appeared.

Eventually I made my way to the beach and slept on the sand. I did something strange, that I’ve never told anyone. A holdover from the days of listening to my cousin the Kabbalist who wore dark glasses, even indoors. He always handed me sweets — palm to palm — so my father wouldn’t see. One day he told me about the magic circle. No harm can come to you when you’re inside the circle, and you can ask God for anything you want, and he will listen. Each night I found a stick and drew a circle in the sand, and curled up inside.

But since our first year in America I loved Halloween. This was how life should be: all the evil spirits and djnoun sidling next to you on the street, and every house open, no locked doors keeping out the stranger, the wanderer. Since that first Halloween our door is never locked. I don’t care what Lili or anyone says. If you’re a djinn after me, or a Hitler-ghost after Lili’s sister, Zizou, a locked door is not going to keep you out. Come and get me. I don’t draw with a stick anymore. With my finger I trace a magic circle around me and Lili in bed, praying to keep us safe and together. She thinks I’m gesturing to music only I hear.

“This is what you don’t get,” says Lili. I must have missed something. I have no idea what it is I don’t get. I murmur something, and she says, “That’s right. This is your life. Our life. Us, here, now. This is it, Danny.”

“I know that.” I clear my throat. Her eyes are silver in moonlight. The street song fades for a moment, and all I see is her face — sad and luminous. “I’m sorry, Loulou.” Always a safe thing to say.

“Stop saying you’re sorry.”

Apparently not tonight.

“I’m sorry,” I say again without thinking.

Her eyebrows meet, eyes glare, lips purse tight. She’s fighting a smile. I’m not sure why she’s mad — besides the usual — or why she’s smiling inside, behind her mouth, behind her eyes. I hear the faint sweet question, the way I did the first time we met, and say impulsively, “Let’s go to bed.”

It’s ridiculously easy to make her blush. “Now? It’s Halloween! We’re in the middle of a … the trick or treaters … the kids …”

I bring her hand to my mouth, try to ignore how chapped and rough it feels, and suck her index finger with its short chopped nail. “Come to bed with me, Loulou.”

“No! I’m mad at you. You’re a little boy who will never grow up. You leave every worry and problem to me. Even the smallest thing I ask you to do. Take your son to the dentist, pay the bill, do —”

I lean over and kiss her on the mouth. She’s struggling inside, the smile still fluttering like a little bird trying to escape. “What if I die tonight?” I ask.

“Oh my God, Danny! What a baby you are. What a child I married. You’re not going to die.”

“But if I do. And you turn me away. How will you feel tomorrow? And the rest of your life?” I’m kissing her ear now, lifting her hair, and rubbing against the back of her neck, her melting spot.

“You won’t,” she begins.

“Shhh. No more words. Let’s go in.”

Later, I follow Sophie up the creaking steps to the second floor, where Lili sleeps in our bed, and Memphis dreams in his room, and Lili’s sister, Zizou, lands wherever her nightmares lead her, and to the third floor, where my drummer and bass player, Carlos and Billy Black, share a room, and Memphis’s guitar teacher, Lucius Green, curls on a cot on the landing, next to Keith, the young sax player visiting from Newark, and tiptoe up the seven narrow stairs to the attic, where I fixed Sophie her own room. Once we got rid of the bats, it was cozy and warm, and she didn’t mind that she could only stand straight in the middle of the room, where the wood rafters crisscrossed to form a pointed ceiling.

She gets in bed and lies back, her dark curls covering the pillow, hands folded neatly on the stubby pink blanket, the one Zizou drapes around her shoulders when she’s in the grip of la folie. Sophie’s cheeks are flushed and rosy, her eyes bright and dark. So beautiful she steals my breath. Mine. My blood. My girl.

“A story, Daddy,” she says calmly, and I know she forgives me.

I don’t deserve her forgiveness, don’t deserve her, or Memphis or Lili. Looking down at my daughter, I wonder if my father ever felt this dizzying rush of love, a wave that almost knocks me back. Suddenly I can’t meet her eyes. I sit on the edge of her bed and turn toward the round porthole window over her bed, always smeared gray, as if it’s storming outside and we’re sailing away in a ship. A sort of magic circle, I never noticed before. The smudges turn into Prosper’s tousled gray hair, the forest-green beret and wobbly teeth, his endlessly generous smile, If the war taught me anything, it’s that we must learn to become human.

Help me, Prosper, please. Help me become the man they need. Help me be strong.

Sophie reaches for my hand and tucks it between hers. Cold cold hands. Like mine. She rubs my hand with all her strength.

“I love you madly,” I tell her, the way Duke Ellington does, though it’s just words, and words can’t touch what I’m feeling right now, this instant, looking at my little girl, wishing I could be the father she deserves.

She sighs. “I love you too, Carson.”

I’ll make it up to you, baby, I swear, I’ll make it up to all of you. Prosper is gone from the window, but I feel him here, looking over my shoulder. Louis and Duke, too. Watching over me. After all, I survived my father and the war, and made it all the way to America, where every man has an equal voice and the right to be heard. I can do this. I can make up a new story, one that hasn’t been told yet because it’s waiting for me to tell it. I clear my throat and begin, “Once upon a time …”
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]]>A Short Ride to Mercyhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/a-short-ride-to-mercy.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/a-short-ride-to-mercy.html#commentsMon, 28 Dec 2015 15:00:34 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113056Fifth runner-up in the 2016 Great American Fiction Contest: Sam didn’t become his dog until Marlene left. The older they got, the more they depended on each other — now more than ever.

]]>From the day Sam was born, I was the one who raised him, but by the time he was a month old he loved Marlene, and in his mind he was her dog, not mine. Even as a puppy his greatest pleasure was stretching out on the shag rug in the den, resting his chin on his front paws and fixing his eyes on her while she read a magazine or listened to the radio. He was totally fascinated, and I began to think the little mutt was a reincarnation of one of Marlene’s old boyfriends. She had exhausted a good supply of boyfriends, but I knew of one good candidate who might have assumed Sam’s body — a biker from Alabama who died in a traffic accident. Sometimes I even wondered how the biker might feel about spending his afterlife as Marlene’s dog. Was it his reward, or a bizarre form of punishment?

Whichever it was, Marlene ignored him. She didn’t like dogs.

She didn’t like me either, and eventually I concluded she had married me because I had a steady day job and spent most of my spare time with my friend John Bee, so she had freedom to polish her nails, do her hair, and watch soaps — whenever she pleased. When she finally left us, I had the consoling company of dear old John, while Sam had only me, and that wasn’t much comfort at all.

He took her absence far harder than I did, spending fitful nights under her empty bed and long days of watching the front door, obviously in hopes it would swing open and she’d be there. But I knew that was never going to happen, and in order to make the transition as easy as possible, John Bee and I went on the longest continual party we had ever thrown. However, the celebration soon turned into a wake, and one evening, while John was taking a sabbatical in the cabinet and I was semi-conscious before the TV, I found that I was scratching Sam’s ears. And for the first time since Marlene left, Sam made a friendly overture to me. He licked my hand and wagged his tail.

I squinted suspiciously at him and said, “So now all of a sudden you’re my dog, is that it?” He looked back with his head cocked to one side and curiosity in his eyes, as if waiting to hear something a bit more profound, and I said the only thing that seemed to be an actual truth: “Well, we got to face facts, Sam. She’s gone now, and it’s my fault.”

He made a sound from deep in his throat that sounded very much like, “Yeah.”

“I guess she had a right to be mad,” I said. “She did warn me. She told me, ‘Harold Fletcher, if you ever put your hands on me like that again, I’m leaving you.’ Those were her exact words. And the whole thing was about nothing — just that she spent a little money at a jewelry party, and for that I shoved her into a wall.” I patted his head. “You remember, don’t you?”

Sam’s only outward response was to lower his head, but I had the eerie feeling that he was re-imaging the whole scene start to finish. He’d seen it all, watched me push her roughly back against the den wall and then stalk away to find my old pal John. And only two weeks later, on a night when I couldn’t find John in his usual hangout, I accused her of holding him prisoner in solitary confinement and demanded his immediate release. She laughed at me, and I felt my face grow hot, and I shoved her again, harder this time. What’s worse, I balled up a fist and shook it at her.

“Go ahead, Harold!” she screamed. “Hit me, you bum!”

I did not hit her, or at least I don’t think I did, but in the morning she was gone, silent as a cat, but I wouldn’t have heard her anyway because it was Saturday and I was sleeping it off. She took the ’68 Pontiac and all her clothes, withdrew half the money in the bank account and left Sam and me to grow old together.

The older we got, the more we came to depend on each other. Sam had a dubious pedigree, to put it kindly, but after a couple of years I knew that he was by far the most obedient and affectionate dog I’d ever had, and much better company than John Bee. And I knew, too, that he was smart, and not just dog-smart. He showed some very human qualities, like his innate sense of knowing when I was sick, or lonely, or disgusted, all of which seemed to happen more often since Marlene and I parted company. Sam would come to where I sat, place his chin on my knee and simply look at me as if to say, Buck up, Harold. It’ll get better. He was right, too, about things getting better, although there were plenty of days when I thought I wouldn’t make it.

Then, during the first week of autumn 1985, while thermometers still showed in the high 80s, I noticed a swelling on Sam’s left hind leg, and at first I figured he had an infected insect bite, a tick maybe, and I wasn’t much concerned until a few days later when he began to limp. I set up a makeshift pen on the back porch, and I picked him up and placed him on an old quilt inside the pen. He yelped in pain as I put him down, and right away I could tell that the swelling on the leg hadn’t receded; it had moved a good two inches upward toward his hip.

In my usual bumbling way, I tried doctoring him myself. I kept him corralled in the pen and applied hot and cold compresses twice a day for a week. He’d had minor ailments before, and he recovered under my care, but this was different. The ugly bulge grew larger, and Sam began giving me plaintive looks as if asking, What’s happening here, Harold?

Finally, for only the second time in his life, I decided to take Sam to the vet, which wasn’t an easy decision for me, because I could still hear the voice of my long-dead old man ranting about vet bills. He had grown up in the Depression when money was almost non-existent, and any spending on a sick or injured dog deprived the family. But I could never abide seeing an animal suffer, Sam especially, and while Doc Sanders’ Veterinary Clinic was only a couple of miles down the road, I had taken Sam there only once, five years ago, and we hadn’t been back. And in my mind we never would be.

There wasn’t any question about Doc Sanders’ skill. He was and is a good vet. The truth is that, at that time, and very publicly, I’d been confronted with all my shortcomings, and I knew I must give up my friend John Bee or die, and I favored neither prospect. It simply seemed that I never got a break, and I became a bad-tempered, self-pitying grump. Sam was about the only creature on Earth who could tolerate me.

Read all six winning stories from The 2016 Great American Fiction Contest

The first time I took Sam to the vet, he was in a lot of pain with a bloated belly, and Doc Sanders handled it in less than an hour. He syringed off the fluid in Sam’s gut and told me to feed my dog more dog food and fewer table scraps. When we left in the truck to go home, Sam rode with his head out the window, his ears flapping in the wind. He was right as rain.

Then the disagreement with Doc started a few weeks later when I got his bill. Of course I knew that Doc couldn’t lowball a fee just to accommodate somebody’s poverty, but I still argued for an adjustment on moral grounds. Doc stood firm on the facts alone and prevailed in the end. The only satisfaction I received was taking nearly a year to pay off the bill.Now I’m 71 years old, and I carry the unhappy incident with Doc Sanders as an embarrassment in my memory. Sam and I are in the waiting room of the vet’s office, and snippets of that first visit still cycle through my head. But I’m hoping that Doc has forgotten about it altogether. One thing for certain: I know I will never bring it up again.

Sam lies curled on the tile floor, his head on my shoe. Now and then he whines in pain, turning one way and then another in an effort to find relief, and all I can do is reach down and pat his head. He licks my hand, and that display of affection despite his pain touches some old and distant memories of my other dogs. I have had several, and the one I think of now is Penny, Sam’s mother. She lost two of the three pups in her last litter and then died herself a month later, leaving Sam an orphan, and I am mulling over the irony that Sam is the nearest thing to a child Marlene and I had together. Then, as Sam whimpers again, the door to the examination room opens and Doc Sanders, older and balder, emerges. He doesn’t smile as he approaches me, but his voice is quietly sympathetic.

“Let’s take him to the back, Mr. Fletcher,” Doc says. “Can you manage him?”

“I can carry him okay. It hurts him, though.”

Doc casts an unhappy look at the swelling on Sam’s leg. “I’m sure it does.”

Sam yelps as I lift him from the floor, and then again as he is eased lengthwise onto the plastic-covered pad of the examining table. “He’s in a bad way, Doc,” I say. “Can you help him?”

“I don’t know.” The vet rubs Sam gently on the shoulder. “I can help his pain, but I won’t lie to you. It may be serious.”

I stand with my hand on Sam’s back and wait as Doc Sanders scrubs. He tosses the paper towel into a waste basket and picks up some latex gloves.

“How old is Sam now?” he asks.

“He’s 12. No, 13.”

He nods. “Well, that’s a long life for a dog. Before he got sick, was he eating okay?”

“Not like he used to. Especially the last couple of months.”

“Okay,” says Doc, rubbing his chin. “I’m going to give him a shot for his pain. You take a seat in the waiting room while I check him out. I’ll come out to see you as quick as I can.”

“Whatever you say, Doc.”

Inwardly I wince a little, wondering if the jaunty reply suggests that I just handed Doc a blank check. But he seems not to have noticed what I said. He is at the cabinet carefully filling a syringe.

I wait outside for another half-hour. A few other pet owners, all women, have gathered in the waiting room while I was in with Sam, and they look up hopefully as the inner door opens and Doc waves for me to come back into the office. On the way, as we pass the examining room, I see that Sam is still on the table, lying stretched out on his side.

“He ain’t dead, is he, Doc?”

“No,” he says. “He’s sleeping from the shot I gave him.” He points to a chair beside his desk and says, “Take a seat, Mr. Fletcher.” I sit down, and Doc leans forward on his desk, his hands clasped together.

“I examined him,” he says, “and I’m 99 percent sure your dog has cancer.” He grimaces, adding, “In fact, I’m a hundred percent sure. We’ve seen a lot of it lately in dogs Sam’s age.” Doc Sanders pauses, looking closely at me as if gauging my reaction to what I am about to hear, and then adds quietly, “There’s nothing to be done, Mr. Fletcher. It’s best to just go ahead and put him down.”

Doc’s words produce a moment of shock during which I have a ridiculous thought: If a dog dies while under a vet’s care, does that eliminate the bill? But instantly I’m ashamed for having such a thought, and I wonder what kind of ridiculous old man I’ve become. “I never thought it would be that bad,” I say. “I thought it was probably something you could fix.”

“It’s nothing like what he had before, Mr. Fletcher,” the vet says, and I know for certain now he still remembers Sam’s first visit. “This is going to kill him.”

The words sting, and suddenly I’m holding back an old man’s tears, and when I can look again at Doc, I see that he is genuinely sorry about Sam, and that is comforting. Finally I ask him, “How long do you reckon he’s got?”

Doc considers for a few seconds. “Maybe three weeks. But he’ll be in terrible pain the whole time.”

“Couldn’t you keep him doped up?”

Doc shakes his head. “That’s just delaying the inevitable. And soon the drugs won’t work anymore.” He leans forward, looking earnestly at me. “Believe me, Mr. Fletcher, it’s the best thing you can do for him.”

I remain silent, but I’m thinking Doc is right, and I can tell he doesn’t want Sam to suffer. But it suddenly seems to me that if I approve the dog’s euthanasia here and now, I will have short-changed Sam and lost something valuable in my own life. I can’t explain it, but my feeling is that something important in the situation isn’t being considered, and in that moment at least, I can’t bring myself to give Doc the okay.

The office door is open, and I can see Sam on the table in the examination room, sleeping peacefully. As I watch, one of Sam’s ears flicks as if a horsefly had landed there, and I feel myself smiling. I think: Old Sam’s dreaming.

“How long will he stay asleep?” I ask Doc.

“Several hours. He’ll probably sleep through the night, and the residual effect of the drug should work through the morning. But by tomorrow evening he’ll be in more pain than ever.”

“Could I take him home for one last day and bring him back tomorrow?”

Doc looks thoughtful. “If that’s what you want to do,” he says, and after a quick pause adds with a nod, “Maybe that’s a good idea. He won’t have much pain, at least for a while. He’ll probably enjoy being home.” He stands up, reaches across the desk, and shakes my hand firmly. “I’m sorry about your dog, Mr. Fletcher. I wish there was something more we could do.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “Things happen.”

“If you’re interested in adoption, I know several prospects.”

I shake my head. “No, thanks, Doc.”

“All right. Be sure to bring Sam back here tomorrow before five.”

Doc helps me get Sam cradled into my arms and then shows us out through the clinic’s back door. The dog weighs a good 30 pounds, maybe more, and it’s a struggle to ease him onto the passenger side of the truck’s bench seat. When he’s settled I haul myself up behind the steering wheel and sit there looking at him. He is breathing quietly, and I begin to think about other dogs I’ve had. I’d lost them one at a time, and each loss produced a little siege of sorrow. But Sam is a different story.

He’s smart — really too smart to be a reincarnated Harley driver with GO TIDE tattooed along the length of his forearm. Sam had shown how smart he was after that first trip to Doc’s, but I was so stupid then I hadn’t recognized it. And it was also the time when I was told, without tact, sympathy, or respect for my feelings, that I must stay away from John Bee forever or be subjected to long-term unhappiness. In simpler terms, just as I was finally getting over Marlene, and just as Sam was showing a little affection for me, I was ordered to stay completely away from booze. As it turned out, it was easy enough to stay away. And it was also very hard.

I had to spend the next 30 days in jail.

Back at home now, I fold an old down comforter to make a pallet in a corner of the bedroom, and Sam never moves when I place him on it. I wash and fill Sam’s water bowl, then open a can of dog food and spoon half of it into his food bowl. Sam has very nearly stopped eating at all, but the food will be there in case he wakes up hungry.

I stand for a moment watching him sleep and wondering why I feel so connected to him. Maybe it’s because Sam is the end of the line, without a doubt the last dog I will ever have. Raising a dog requires time, money, and patience, and I am lacking in all three now.

After a few minutes I tiptoe to the living room and turn on the TV, snooze through an old John Wayne movie, then go back to the bedroom and ease into bed. I lie listening to Sam’s breathing, and once during the night I awake to listen again and he is snoring softly. Then in the morning the first thing I see is Sam waiting at my bedside, his smart dog stare riveted on my face. He seems to be saying, Harold, old boy, you are sleeping away the morning.

I lever myself up on one elbow and say, “Well, look at you. Doing better, huh?” But it’s a ridiculous thing to say because I know it’s the shot’s residual effect and the improvement won’t last for long. Sam doesn’t seem inclined to move, but he watches intently as I get slowly out of bed and start to dress, and he gives a weak wag of his tail as I sit down on the bed to put on my shoes. All the time I am watching him out of the corner of my eye, and I see in his rapt expression a behavior I’ve seen many times, although now there is no excited barking or tail chasing as there was before. Still I can see in Sam’s eyes what he wants.

“Old dog,” I say, “do you want to take a ride? Just get in the truck and go like we used to?” At the word truck Sam’s body gives a quick jerk and his tail switches twice, but still he doesn’t move. I finish tying my shoes and reach over to pat him and he gives me a lick in return.

“You remember,” I say, smoothing the fur on his back, “I’m driving, and you’ve got your head stuck through the window. I never knew why dogs like that, but it seemed to suit you just fine.”

Sam whines, looking up at me. His eyes are rimmed in bright red, and I’m thinking: If this is your last day, old dog, you should do whatever you please.

“How about it?” I ask him. “Take a little ride in the truck?”

Sam lifts his head and looks at the door in the kitchen that opens onto the concrete pad where the truck is parked. Then he pulls himself carefully onto his three functioning legs and begins limping awkwardly toward it. When he reaches the door, he stops and looks back at me.

With a shrug I say, “You want to go right now? Okay. We’ll go right now.”

Sam turns his eyes from me and fixes them on the doorknob, waiting patiently as I button my cardigan sweater. It is the kind of early fall morning when the air starts out cool but by afternoon it is summer again. The coolness, when I open the door, seems to energize the dog, and he moves in a lurching walk across the back porch to the steps and there he stops. He looks up at me again.

“Okay,” I say. “I got you.” Again I lift him as gently as I can and negotiate the three steps to the concrete and put him down. He didn’t yelp when I picked him up, which tells me the pain shot is still working, and that’s a good thing.

Sam limps his way toward the truck, and I follow. I open the passenger door and lift him to the seat, waiting until he settles himself, and then I crank the window partly down and close the door. Sam lifts his head, but only to watch the driver’s door until I get behind the wheel. As I start the engine, he lets his chin fall to rest on his paws.

“You ready?” I say to him. “Okay, let’s go.”

We pulled out slowly onto the main road through town, stopping only to get five gallons of gas and a sausage biscuit at the Gulf station. Back on the road I offer Sam a bit of the sausage and he takes it so quickly that it surprises me, and with unwise generosity I give him the whole patty. As he eats it, I think, Maybe his appetite’s coming back, and we can call it off for a while.

“What about a run out to Logan’s Lake?” I say. “Maybe you can’t chase ducks like you used to, but we can walk out on the dock. What do you think?”

Sam’s tail thumps the seat a couple of times. “I’ll take that as a yes,” I say.

It only takes 20 minutes down a side road to reach Logan’s Lake, which is little more than a pond at the edge of the state park. In better days Sam always enjoyed going there, and now he lifts his head higher to look at the water as I pull into the parking area near the dock. I step from the running board onto the ground and circle around to open Sam’s door.

“Come on, dog,” I say. “Let’s go look for ducks.”

I pick Sam up again and carry him down the slope to the lakeshore and onto the dock, and when we reach the wide platform at the end, I set him gently down onto the planking. He whimpers a little as I release him, and then he drops his chin onto his forepaws and lies quietly looking out at the water.

I can tell he’s starting to hurt again.

We wait on the dock for nearly 10 minutes before three of the resident greenheads come swimming toward us, and to my surprise Sam comes instantly alert, head quickly lifting and his eyes suddenly bright and alive and fixed on the ducks, all his instincts awake. I see the old dog’s body twitch with excitement, and I know his launch mechanism is wound tight and ready to propel him like a slingshot if those ducks come out of the water. But in the end Sam never moves. The ducks come close to the dock and tarry, dabbling and quacking, but when no food is thrown, they lose interest and swim back the way they came.

If a dog can show disappointment, I see it in Sam’s eyes as he looks at me, and I say, “Listen, dog, if you weren’t sick, you’d give ’em a good run for their money and they know it.” We both look out at the water for a few more minutes, and I feel the sun beginning to heat the plank floor, so I ask, “You want to go back to the truck now?”

The word truck again touches a nerve in Sam, and the muscles of his body make a tiny ripple along his back. He pushes himself up on his front legs, but can only go so far, and he looks again at me. “All right,” I say. “I got you.”

I settle Sam again on the truck’s seat, and we drive back toward the highway. He makes no effort to lift his head to see through the windshield, and I am sure now that the painkiller has worn off completely. I reach over and pat his head again, but there is no reaction, as if he cannot feel my hand. For a dreadful moment, because his eyes are closed, I think he is already dead. But when I place my hand on his side I can feel that he’s still breathing.

I say to him, “I hate this, old dog. You deserve better than you got. I am sorry.”

He still doesn’t respond to my voice. Then when I stop at the highway intersection, I say to him, “I’d better take you to see Doc now.”

He does react to the word Doc. His eyes open and his head swings upward as though he’s making an effort to get to his feet. His tail twitches once, and then he lies still again.

“That’ll be a mercy, won’t it, Sam?”

Sam doesn’t make a sound. But he turns his eyes to the windshield, steadily looking at it, and to me he’s clearly saying: Drive, Harold.

The clinic is 30 minutes away. Sam lies very still on the bench seat, and as I keep a glancing eye on him, I think: Mercy’s a short commodity anymore.My old drunk of a father never showed mercy to anyone. And look at me now: I hurt my wife, and she hurt me in return, and neither of us had any thought about mercy for the other.

I remember also Doc’s advice in his office about putting Sam down, and the feeling I had of missing something important, and finally it comes to me. Yesterday I wasn’t sure, and I couldn’t make a decision without knowing what Sam wanted. But on this little trip, which I realize was for my benefit, not Sam’s, he has informed me. He wants a merciful end to the agony, something only Doc can deliver, and my part of the process is simply to get him there because he can’t go by himself now. It’s as if he’s saying: It was a nice ride, Harold, but it’s over now.

Then in my mind it is five years ago, right after the time Doc drained the fluid from Sam. Marlene has gone, and John Bee and I are still exploring the concept of permanent inebriation when a trooper pulls me over simply for weaving on the road and being unable to walk a straight line. I serve the 30-day minimum sentence, and Sam survives on whatever leftovers the neighbors bring him.

After they release me, I go straight home, find John Bee still in the cabinet, and drink myself into a semi-stupor. Then the telephone rings, and when I finally find it, a woman’s voice says, “Oh, Mr. Fletcher, I’m glad I reached you. This is Dr. Sander’s office. Your dog is here.”

“Whose dog?”

“Your dog, Sam. The doctor drained the fluid off his tummy again. Did you want pick him up?”

“It’s a mistake,” I say. “Sam’s out back somewhere.”

She says something else just as I hang up, and then the phone rings again, and this time it’s Doc himself.

“Rita wasn’t mistaken, Mr. Fletcher. Sam has come in by himself three times in the last month. His belly’s still swelling and giving him pain, so he barks at the back door until somebody lets him in, and then he goes straight to the OR and jumps on the table; I drain off the fluid, and he gets down and heads for the door. We’ve been trying to reach you.”

I listen, but so far nothing Doc says makes sense.

He gives a little laugh. “That’s some smart dog you’ve got. He knows what to do when he needs help. Don’t think I ever saw one with that much initiative.”

There’s a silence. Doc says, “Are you there, Mr. Fletcher?”

Even I can tell my words are slurred. “I’ve been pretty sick, Doc.”

“Oh? I’m sorry,” he says. “I guess that’s why the dog came in by himself. We’ve got Sam’s fluid problems settled now, but watch his diet, okay? I’ll send you a bill for the treatments. Do you want me to let him go home on his own?”

“Sure,” I mumble. “That’ll be fine.”I park near the back door of Doc’s clinic and help Sam carefully to the ground. To my surprise he heads straight for the door, literally dragging his leg now, but moving faster than at any time that day, even lurching up two steps to the porch landing where he stops and stares at the door. He doesn’t bark, but he doesn’t need to. A well-dressed woman holding a toy poodle opens the door and steps out, and Sam slips quickly past her and disappears inside.

Startled, the woman gasps, “Well, for heaven’s sake.” Then she spies me standing by the truck. “Was that your dog that just went in?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She is obviously miffed. “Can’t you control him?” she asks. “He seems to have a mind of his own.”

“Yes, ma’am. He does for a fact.”

I wait in the hallway outside the OR. I see Sam standing by the table, waiting for help. He looks at me over his shoulder, but I can tell I’m not the person he wants to see. He turns away, and I mutter softly, “So long, Sam,” just as Doc appears, nods to me and says, “This takes only a few minutes, Mr. Fletcher. Would you like to come in?”

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/a-short-ride-to-mercy.html/feed6A Ring, Some Pearls, Perhaps a Watchhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/a-ring-some-pearls-perhaps-a-watch.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/a-ring-some-pearls-perhaps-a-watch.html#commentsMon, 28 Dec 2015 15:00:29 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113035Second runner-up in the 2016 Great American Fiction Contest: Where was the boy nobody played with, and what did he see?

]]>His tiny fingertips skimmed the iPad. The hands of a surgeon, thought his mother. So graceful, so confident. Or maybe the piano. They’ll fly on piano keys. Yes. They were the hands of someone who’ll play Carnegie Hall.

“Simon, which face looks mean?” They made it a game.

Not as much mean as recalcitrant, he thought. Perhaps refractory, mulish, pig-headed. Lines from a dictionary flashed on the ceiling. He lifted his head and read.

She cupped his chin and gently steered him back to work. “Watch the computer screen, Simon. The eyebrows are arched, the mouth corners are up, the eyes are twinkling. I think that’s a happy face. Do you think that’s a happy face?”

They raced through the program like they did every night and stuck gold stars to a chart. Then came the hard part. Making stories out of pages in a magazine. Serena had cut out the pictures ahead of time and pasted them on notebook paper. Simon had to fill in the bubbles.

“The man has shirts. Lots of shirts,” said Simon.

“What do you think he’s doing? There’s a bull’s-eye, right? A red bull’s-eye under the picture. There’s a cash register, too.”

“Target, Target, Target,” the child responded.

“Words, Simon. Use your words. What do you think the man could be saying?”

“Expect more, pay less.” Tilting his head, he hummed.

They both heard the glass break at the same time. It sounded like the noise came from downstairs. A dozen presents sat underneath a Christmas tree by a large window. “Hide,” whispered Serena. There was no phone in Simon’s bedroom. The ringing startled him, anything sudden startled him. Serena would have to walk down the hall to call the police. Be quiet, be good were her last words as she shut his door.

It was a typical home in West Miami. Houses lined the block like concrete bunkers, each separated by a few yards of grass. People were close enough to hear Serena’s screams. Almost three hours passed until they found Simon. His mother’s body was long gone. The crime scene — the family room couch bathed in blood, the upended lamps — were taped off. The neighbors had almost forgotten about the boy, the strange boy nobody played with.

“He probably run off,” said an elderly man. “He always run off. She find him blocks away like a stray dog.”

A woman stepped out of the shadows. Slim, pale, already dressed in black. “I work with Serena at the school. Sometimes when she needs to go to the store, I watch him.”

The policeman wrote in his clipboard. The woman spoke and waited, spoke and waited. Breathing. When he glanced up, she started talking again. “I’m Amy. Amy Ritter. Simon’s 10 … did you find him? He likes to hide. He ends up in the oddest places. Behind sofas, inside cabinets.”

They found him behind the curtains, sleeping in the window seat. Serena had taken one of the sheets that matched his bedding and hung it floor-to-ceiling. No one scrutinizing the room would have guessed there was anything but wall behind it. It was his favorite hiding place. “Are you hiding in your fortress again?” his mother would say. “Or today is it a castle?”

Curled like a fetus, the child was too still. “Son, are you all right?” The policeman knelt at eye level. Even when he poked him, there was no response. Amy had to rub his arm and shout his name three times to wake him up. The boy opened his eyes and blinked.

“Simon,” said Amy, this is Officer Martinez.”

The man spoke slowly, over-enunciating each word, the way some people speak to the deaf. “You … feeling … okay?”

Read all six winning stories from The 2016 Great American Fiction Contest

Simon stared at the face that loomed inches from his own. It was a jumble of eyes and ears and teeth. Only the nose caught his attention. There were huge holes on the man’s nose. Holes bigger than the La Brea Tar Pits. Larger than the Grand Canyon. The holes were like craters on the moon.

“I bet you’re Simon.” When the man tried to steer him away from the curtains, Simon pulled away. Then he tucked in his arms and legs and lowered his head. That’s how hermit crabs defend themselves from predators, he remembered. He pretended his back was a shell.

“I think it’s time to come out, buddy. You must be hungry. My kids are always hungry.”

Simon thought about his stomach and realized yes, it did feel empty. He stood up. The nose with all the holes belonged to a head that was attached to a very tall man in his bedroom. He was in a policeman’s uniform. Maybe he was a policeman.

“I’m Officer Martinez.”

A computer screen lit up in Simon’s head. Eyebrows straight, mouth down. A sad face, maybe a worried face. Then the screen quickly linked to another site.

“Ramon Martinez,” blurted Simon. “Earned run average 3.67. Win/loss 135-88. Born March 22, 1968, in the Dominican Republic.” His voice found a rhythm, rising and falling like an elevator. He swayed from side to side, standing on one foot then the other. Like the radio announcers, full of vinegar and pep. “With a lifetime strikeout record of 1,427, Martinez was one of this decade’s most outstanding pitchers.”

“You don’t say.” Martinez cocked an eyebrow and glanced at Amy, the two of them standing by a bed shaped like a race car, the comforter covered in cars, the curtains covered in cars.

She nodded.

“So you like baseball,” Martinez continued, “and you like cars.”

Simon studied the policeman’s face. Now he seemed quizzical. Though perhaps he was unsure or undecided. It was hard to tell. The faces never matched the ones on the computer. It was like the computer was frozen and real life moved. Pages of his favorite book leafed through his mind An Anthology of Scientific Facts published by Harcourt Brace, copyright 2010. He loved the heaviness, the heft, the way it felt when he lay down on this bed and put it on his tummy. Did you know that insects can be trapped in amber for centuries? Their wings locked, their very breaths trapped forever. They don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they don’t die. Real life moved.

“Is my mother dead?” he asked.

When he told the policeman that the man had been inside his room, at first he didn’t believe him. It appeared untouched. Clothes were carefully folded in drawers. The closet doors were closed. Even the toys were put away. The man simply took his father’s watch off his dresser and left.

“What did he look like?” asked Officer Martinez. “Do you remember what he looked like?”

Simon scrunched his eyes and gazed at the ceiling. “A red hat. Kitchen gloves. Black sneakers.” He slashed the air with his finger. “A Nike’s swoosh.”

But the face was a blur. He could not remember the face. Serena’s cries had long stopped. The house was eerily quiet. Simon sat on the window seat, peeked through the curtains, and watched the man, the man who hurt his mother, then he lay down and slept.

Amy stayed with him the next week. Simon liked Amy. Her hair smelled like soap. Her voice sounded like Christmas carols, and she used funny words. gosh darn whatchamacallit jeepers. But when they found his grandfather, the grandfather his mother never spoke about, the grandfather he never even knew, she went home.

It was up to her to break the news. They were baking chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. Simon was pounding the dough on the kitchen table, kneading until his knuckles gave out. “Serena never told me about your grandfather. Did she talk about your daddy’s daddy?”

Simon read Amy’s face like brail. She was easy. Furrows rutted her forehead when she worried, furrows like tire tracks. He didn’t have to look at her to see them. He could squish the dough, squeeze it out though his fingers, and listen to her all at the same time. Serena would be proud. Yes, that is worried.

“Did they tell you he made cars? He worked on the line in Flint. He’s coming all the way from Michigan to stay with you, Simon.”

He was making a mud pie. If he used the flat of his palm it could be huge. Perhaps the world’s biggest. He tilted his head and started humming, humming loud enough to drown out the thump thump thump of the overhead fan, the buzz of the refrigerator, Amy.

“And I’m just three blocks away if you need me, right?” She sounded funny, like she was hiccuping. Simon hummed louder. Soon he could no longer hear the words.

The Grandfather came the next day.

“You Simon?”

He nodded.

“I’m George.”

They stared at each other for five minutes taking a head-to-toe inventory. George spoke first. “I could use a nap. Where can I take my nap?”

His two battered suitcases were slid into Serena’s closet. Then the stranger who called himself George lay down in her bed. His mother’s aura, the scent of gardenias, was displaced by something unfamiliar. Foresty odors like wood chips and pine needles. Even though it was September, his grandfather wore a flannel shirt. The temperature outside was a sticky 85 degrees, but he kept the shirt on right through supper.

Streams of sweat ran down George’s neck while he boiled a can of chicken noodle soup. Together they foraged the pantry, opening and closing doors. Simon found saltines. On the highest shelf, the one above the refrigerator, George found the Scotch.

“You mind if I indulge?” A shaky hand poured the brown liquor into a glass. Then they both sat down at the kitchen table. Simon shoved one cracker after another into his mouth, working his way through the box. His grandfather drank.

“I got the Parkinson’s. GM gave me early retirement. Disability pay.”

Simon watched him slowly sip, the booze splashing on the table now, almost as much landing outside the glass as staying in. The more George drank, the more his hand shook. His tongue got looser, too. Soon he was talking nonstop, a stream of words flowing out, the sounds liquid. They carried Simon like an ocean wave.

“You know what it’s like? It’s like my brain is stuck in second gear. I can’t shave no more, I can’t even put on my socks. So I say to my hand. Okay, this is the plan. You’re going pick up that razor and get this stubble off my face. Just like you’ve been doing for the last 60 years. Only all of a sudden there’s a breakdown in communication.”

He glimpsed at Simon, his hands in a frenzy as he poured himself another glass. “You don’t talk much do you?”

“I’m stuck, too.”

That night, like every night since the incident, Simon had a nightmare. Like most of Simon’s dreams, they were so vivid and lifelike that he had trouble telling they were over when he woke up. He dreamt about the watch. He was on the school playground when numbers suddenly flew at him like hailstones. He scurried in circles, trying to find someplace safe, dodging and ducking. Still they kept on coming.

“He wanted you to have it,” said Serena. “It’s your legacy.” Serena didn’t believe in using baby talk when speaking to children. “It’s your inheritance,” said Serena. “For posterity.” The car accident had happened a month before his third birthday. One minute his father went out for a quart of orange juice and the next minute he was dead.

The watch wasn’t a toy like his miniature Millennium Falcon or as interesting as his goldfish. But each night he touched it like a talisman before he went to bed. Now it wasn’t there. Like the hole in his mouth where a baby tooth fell out, something was missing. And when the nightmares came, when he heard his mother’s screams, a ticking metronome always lurked in the background. The watch in his dreams never failed to remind him of what was gone.

Martinez called. Could they come to the police station? There was another robbery and this time a silent alarm alerted the police. A block away from the house they found a pillowcase filled with jewelry. Two blocks away they found the thief. He was high, they said, and had a rap sheet. If someone made a positive identification, they could lock him up.

The room was bigger than the school gym. Simon held his grandfather’s hand as they walked from one policeman’s desk to another. Phones rang and pencil sharpeners churned. Simon rubbed his ears. People were screeching in Spanish, English, Creole. They sound like cicadas, he thought. Like a tornado of cicadas.

“Which one is Martinez?” George had a cataract in his right eye. He walked with his head at a tilt.

Simon slowly inched up the aisles, scanning the faces. Finally he spotted a man almost as tall as the doorframe. He got close enough to inspect his nose. The holes were even larger today.

Martinez glanced up from his paperwork and sighed. “I’m gonna show you a lineup.” When he looked Simon in the eye, the boy looked away. “Remember it’s one-way glass. You can see them but they can’t see you.”

There were five men standing in a row with numbers on their chests. But no matter how hard Simon stared at their faces, they resembled out-of-focus snapshots. Blurred. His hands got sweaty and he wiped them on his shirt. Up down. Up down. Up down. He could swear he heard laughing, but when he turned around to confront his classmates, to see if Bobby or Emmanuel or any other of the mean boys had followed him into the police station, no one was there.

Martinez ushered them into the hall. He spoke quickly like he was busy, like other people were studying lineups who didn’t stumble, who without hesitation remembered the face of the man who killed their mother. When he said Don’t worry son, I knew it was a long shot, he sounded like Simon’s PE coach after he struck out or threw a basketball into the wrong hoop. Overhead lights crackled. Cicadas screeched. Flapping his hands, Simon opened his mouth as wide as he could and screamed.

Fifty heads craned to glare. While Martinez jumped backwards, George closed in. He wrapped his arms around the boy and squeezed. “Remember when we read your book about the boa constrictors?” They started rocking, shifting their weight like a ship at sea, the grandfather all the while counting. One two three four five. One two three four five. One two three four five. Soon Simon’s heartbeat fell in with the rhythm. One two three four five. One two three four five.

“Those men all look alike to me, too,” said George.

On the way home, they stopped at a restaurant and had pancakes for dinner. It was the one food they agreed upon. In many ways, George was as picky an eater as his grandson. Every morning he had oatmeal, every lunch was soup, and every dinner macaroni and cheese. Meanwhile Simon preferred things crunchy. Granola, carrot sticks, little crispy fish sticks shaped like fish.

That night, George let him stay up past his bedtime. When Simon went to sleep late, he was too tired to have nightmares. Instead they watched football on TV. The old man had a pudding cup while the boy microwaved popcorn. Together they poured the last of the Scotch down the kitchen sink.

When his eyelids were fluttery and his feet seemed too heavy to lift, Simon let George carry him into Serena’s bathroom and set him on the edge of the tub. There was nothing that calmed Simon down more than watching his grandfather get ready for bed. He was soldierly and neat, and Simon loved soldierly and neat. A row of brand new toothbrushes was lined up along the sink and each night George unwrapped a new one, brushed his teeth, then threw the used one away. He did the same thing with soap. He’d use a bar once then toss it in the garbage. Sometimes, thought Simon, you just can’t get clean enough.

Next it was his turn. He counted 10 brushstrokes on each side of his mouth and spurted the toothpaste out into the water glass 10 times. He took the fresh pajamas that he laid out on his bed that morning then carefully inserted his legs into the pants and his arms into the top. Then he slipped under the sheets and pulled three blankets up to his chin. Tuck tuck tuck tuck tuck. While his grandfather sat in a chair by his bed (his mother had sat by his feet), Simon read 20 pages (not 9 not 11) of one of his top 10 favorite books. This week they were rereading The Hobbit (Houghton Mifflin Books, January 1, 1966, edition). Simon had read the trilogy at least a dozen times.

“There is nothing like looking if you want to find something.”

Simon pronounced the passages loudly and clearly. Every few minutes he glanced at George to see if his chin was resting on his chest. His grandfather was a never-ending source of amazement. Like a horse, he could sleep standing up.

“You usually find something if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.” He had read 10 pages. Tuck tuck tuck tuck tuck. And then he fell asleep.

Six weeks later, Martinez called them again. George answered the phone. There was noise in the background. People were shouting in strange languages. The officer got straight to the point. “It’s time to hit the pawnshops. Bring a list of the jewelry you’re missing, photos, whatever you have as proof of ownership.”

“Hold on. Hold on. Let me get a pen.” George combed through the kitchen drawers for something to write with. By the time he lifted the receiver again he was out of breath.

“They sit on goods for 60 days. Then they release them.”

“Where do we go? Is there an address?” George got lost driving to the supermarket.

“Start with Homestead and work your way up. Cutler Ridge, Liberty City, Overtown.”

George straightened his back, hitched up his trousers, and cracked his neck. For years, his life consisted of driving to the VA Hospital and the Veteran’s lodge. Loop after loop like a skein of yarn. He liked the predictability, the safeness of it. Now things were unraveling.

“Homestead? Where’s Homestead?”

“FYI. The brokers are supposed to fingerprint and register their clientele. Comprende? Sometimes we get lucky.”

They sat down at the kitchen table and unfolded a map of South Florida. Serena’s absence was still palpable, like a chunk of unswallowed food in their throats. Her lipsticked coffee mug, the handwritten notes she left on the refrigerator.

“Did I tell you I met your mom once?”

Simon’s eyebrows jumped.

“I was into the sauce then. Your grandmother had just died. I don’t think I made a positive impression.”

His wife had suffered a long lingering death from cancer. If there were five stages of mourning, George wallowed in step two. Anger. He hated when they couched disease in military terms, when they called the treatment a battle, or the victim a casualty. George served two tours in Vietnam. There at least you had a fighting chance.

“Everyone loved Gloria. Never forgot a birthday. Swapped recipes with strangers on the bus.”

As soon as his wife died, his world spun apart. She was his center of gravity. The one who chatted with the neighbors, sweet-talked bill collectors, smiled through pain. You knew what you were getting with George. There was no sugarcoating with George.

“We have to make up a list. There’s a ring, a watch. You think anything else’s missing?”

They opened every drawer in Serena’s bureau, handling her panties and bras like they were tissue. They peeked under the bed and in the closet. Her scent was everywhere. Simon held her dresses to his face and buried his nose. Gardenias. They still smelled like gardenias. It wasn’t until he worked up the courage to search the photo albums that his synapses clicked. Yes, there she was in her wedding picture wearing pearls. He had never thought about his mother’s pearls. They were hidden in a small jewelry box, the red leather one she kept on her bureau. That was gone, too.

They treated their job like a reconnaissance mission. George wore his old army jacket even though it clenched his armpits. Simon carried a backpack with supplies: pudding cups, granola bars, water, his Swiss army knife.

“Take photos,” said Martinez. “Everything starts to look alike.”

The trek down US 1 in Serena’s Camry seemed endless that first Saturday. George didn’t care for the radio (You call that music!!), so he talked while he drove. Simon decided his grandfather was an automotive genius. He knew as much about vehicles as Simon knew about dinosaurs, about the animal kingdom, about crystal formation, about the constellations. If someone wanted to publish The Anthology of Vehicular Facts, his grandfather could write it.

“The 1971 Camaro was a beauty. A-arm front suspension. Leaf springs on the rear axles. An air induction hood scoop that opened when you hit full throttle. That Z28 was one of the 10 best cars in the world.” On and on he rambled until Simon closed his eyes, the words droning like a lullaby, lulling him to sleep.

The farther south they went the more dilapidated the neighborhoods became. There were bars on all the storefront windows, a spindly palm tree the only sign of green. It seemed that every other block was either a pawnshop or a fast food establishment. They pulled onto the curb in front of Al’s Pawn. First one metal door, then they were buzzed through another. A dark brown man with a wooly head sat on a stool behind a counter. He waved at them and offered a half smile. One of his front teeth was gold.

“We’re on the hunt for a diamond ring, some pearls, perhaps a watch,” said George.

“Looking’s free,” the clerk replied. In a corner was a TV. The announcer was calling football plays.

Simon scanned a shelf of watches and shook his head. Nothing was familiar.

“You don’t have too much in the way of fancy jewelry,” said George.

“Just what you see.” Someone ran through the goalposts and the crowd went wild. The clerk threw up his arms and yelled Touchdown!

They had no better luck in the next three stores. Instead of asking for help, they quietly sifted through the merchandise. George perused the tables with military paraphernalia. Simon liked the old clocks. It was like crawling through someone’s attic. Most of the stuff had been there for ages. Broken. Abandoned.

The fifth store, the one in Goulds, was the start of their education. They were making their way past bins of garage sale leftovers when a man with a long bushy beard, a black fedora, and a black suit walked into the shop. The salesclerk made a phone call and five minutes later an elderly man appeared from a back office. He was bent like a question mark, his face rutted with age. He shook the hand of the man in the suit, took a key out from his pocket, and disappeared behind another door. Minutes later, a dozen trays of rings, necklaces, and watches were laid on top of the counter. Gems sparkled. Gold glinted like sun.

Simon slowly walked over. The men were too busy talking to notice him, the one in the fedora swooping his arms, gesturing, the old man nodding. His mother’s ring was a simple round diamond on a silver band. One entire tray was filled with them. To Simon they were all alike. The watches had the words Rolex on their faces. None said Bulova, like his father’s.

They almost met success at a store in Hialeah. Half the shelves were stocked with swastikas. Ashtrays with swastikas. Helmets with swastikas. Posters with swastikas. George’s Purple Heart worked like a password. The owner put his arm around his shoulder and the glass doors in his cabinets flew open.

Still the diamond solitaires and ropes of pearls all seemed identical to Simon while the watches all looked unfamiliar. Simon stared and stared. And when a slice of sun cut its way through the blinds and onto the countertop, he covered his eyes in pain. Metal gleamed like shards of glass and diamonds burned like ice. “Hot! Hot! Hot!” he screamed. He flapped his hands and spun like a top to make the burning stop.

“Can you close the shutters?” George bellowed. “Turn off some lights for Christ’s sake!”

Then they counted. One two three four five. One two three four five. George wrapped the child in his jacket, stroked his back, and massaged his arms. When Simon finally calmed down, they walked back to the car. Words weren’t necessary. The boy and his grandfather knew each other’s shorthand. The shrug of a shoulder was enough.

Slowly their lives were finding a groove, the knots loosening. They drove to the pawnshops every Saturday, making their way as far north as Orlando then turning around. The lives settled into a routine. George met with Simon’s teachers and helped him with his homework. And after school, they threw baseballs in the backyard and tinkered under the hood of the Camry. Together they grew.

At the supermarket one day, Simon pointed out to George the rows of soaps that came in bottles. “You can pump them,” explained Simon. “Each time it’s like new.” George narrowed his eyes then dumped a bottle in the cart. And when they started reading The Fellowship of the Rings, Simon forgot to count the pages. Sometimes they read 20 even 30 at a sitting. Together they made a chart of Middle Earth so George could keep the names right. His grandfather even stopped falling asleep.

They both dreaded the approach of Mother’s Day. Like they did every Sunday they went to their favorite restaurant for pancakes. But the booths were teeming with families that day. Babies were crying, kids were running up and down the aisles, the tables overflowing with gifts. George cleared his throat.

“Next month school ends. Right?”

Simon nodded.

“I thought we’d take a little road trip.”

He took a box out of his pocket and held it out. “Here, open it.”

“A compass, it’s a compass, Grandpa.” Simon traced the round surface with his finger. It reminded him of his father’s watch. He’d keep it on his dresser.

“I figure we’ll hit Jacksonville and work our way west. We have family in Michigan. And I believe Gloria had some cousins in California as well.”

“Can we visit the pawnshops?” asked Simon.

“Of course, of course. That’s part and parcel of the expedition.”

The boy smeared the maple syrup around his plate with his spoon. Then he stared at the mess like it had all the answers. “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” His lips kept moving, silently repeating Tolkien’s words. He didn’t know if he was saying them or thinking them. If they were quiet or if they were loud. But they were always there.

“And we can bring your books. We can read every night if you want. I believe The Return of the King comes next.”

Simon dipped his thumb into the syrup and traced the edge of this plate.

“Poor Frodo,” said his grandfather.

Simon glanced up. His thumb was midair, his mouth, open.

“All that trouble just to rid himself a ring.”

They bought maps from every state and that night spread them out on the linoleum from the kitchen down the hall to the family room.

“This is the fun part.” With a shaky hand George held up a red marker. “We start with Miami.”

Simon nodded. He would collect postcards from every city. There would be rocks from the Rocky Mountains and salt from the Great Salt Flats. A cap from Dodger Stadium and a lobster bib from Maine. He could see it.

With his fingers guiding his grandfather’s, his small hand cupped over the larger one, they drew the first small circle. They made lists of provisions and researched motels. They packed a stack of old books and bought some new ones, too. They gathered names and addresses of friends and relatives from the east coast to the west and together they plotted their future.
—The 2017 Fiction Contest is underway! Click here to enter.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/12/28/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/a-ring-some-pearls-perhaps-a-watch.html/feed2The Three of Ushttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/three-of-us.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/three-of-us.html#commentsWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=105519Laurie thought she knew everything about Paula, the brilliant and beautiful ex-wife of her fiancé, John.

The first time I met Paula was at a launch party for John’s third volume on the Greeks, this one on Aristotle. Since I didn’t know him when he completed the first two, I felt no obligation to read them, thank God, because only Google and thumbing through some of Aristotle’s Poetics got me through the third and gave me enough courage to attend the party. John had not exaggerated his former wife’s looks. She had dark eyes and one of those rare beauty marks above one side of her upper lip, a small black dot — and it wasn’t superimposed. A glittering silver cord was worked into her hair and the braided black bundle secured with studded hairpins that caught the light as she moved her head in animated discussion. She was standing with three other professors I had met at an event days before where I was quickly outed as a flight attendant, having had nothing to contribute to a conversation about Boccaccio’s Decameron. A moment’s silence and species assessment ensued but John had counseled me of possible reactions to my career — especially from Paula — and now the moment had come for that introduction. Her hand came toward me and I took it, bringing together John’s ex and his talked-about in a slide of palms so fast that only someone pre-focused could have seen it.

Read all the winning stories from the Great American Fiction Contest 2015:

It was not Paula’s appearance that made me nervous. I was, as immodest as this is, a rather striking woman myself — all reddish hues in contrast to her raven ones — abundant auburn hair, hazelish eyes tending green, high cheek color and very nice, well, great full lips. We were both tall, she with distinctive proportions, I with flat alignment, but it suited me. No, what made me nervous was Paula’s Ph.D. and the view John said she’d have of my career. She got right to it.

Before she could continue, a Professor Debané joined us and I was introduced. His name and my agitation in facing Paula spurred me to jump on a possible opportunity and my voice came out like a border guard asking for papers. “Your name is French. Are you French, Professor Debané?” The question was artless and the delivery merited their laughter even though the professor spoke English like an American and could have been. I suddenly felt awkward and way out of my league. The professor responded that he was indeed French and asked if I had some familiarity with the language, without a hint of condescension in his voice or manner. I wanted to kiss him on both of his august cheeks for that and for handing me the hoped-for opportunity.

“ Yes … I speak French,” I said. This declaration from an American is commonly illustrated in painfully accented classroom French, and although John was aware I sometimes used French, in the two months we had dated he had never heard me speak it. I could feel his blood ebb and Paula’s glee.

“Oh, do you? Wonderful! We all speak some French here, so let’s have 15 minutes of immersion. It will be fun, like our summer in Provence, John,” she said and touched his arm. They exchanged a look and John edged closer to my side. “Arnaud hardly needs immersion in French,” he said, nodding toward Professor Debané and taking my hand. “Why don’t we just — ”

“Oh, John, always so rational.” She turned her palms up in appeal to the others. There were no objections and she immediately addressed me in French, asking why I had become a flight attendant when today it was not glamorous and involved such unpleasant work, underscoring her disdain in the phrasing. She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head for my response, and all eyes were on me except John’s. He avoided my glances, shifted his weight, and began to squeeze my hand. Without his support, the professorial surround paralyzed me and I seemed to forget the situation and how I ended up the center of it. “Laurie?” Paula said. Her voice snapped me back, and I saw myself behind a rising screen, about to be revealed to a curious audience, and due to that overexcited image and four glasses of wine, I became autobiographical, beginning with the fourth grade where I first read about the pyramids and Africa’s animals and resolved to see them someday, then soared on to my senior year of college where the fourth-grade resolve still held.

Paula’s dark eyes blinked at me as though trying to focus and John let go of my hand and made a half-turn putting me in his full view. The collective surprise was palpable. All my awkwardness blew away like fuzz on a dandelion leaving behind a sweet confidence, so I went on, rhapsodizing about being able to ski the slopes of Chamonix and Gstaad, meeting people of other cultures, seeing friends no matter where they lived. “All this — and at a discount,” I concluded.

I was not French, as Professor Debané assumed, but no one would think otherwise when I spoke it, thanks to my uncle’s wife Marie-Annick and her role in my upbringing. Americans who speak French with native fluency are accorded a higher status than those who speak fluent Czech, say, or Ukrainian, or almost any other more unique language, and my French went a long way at the launch party in compensating John for my career choice. It did not offend me that people found our relationship incongruous as I knew from the beginning that a 40ish, tenured, scholar of renown would have to squirm a lot with a flight attendant on his arm. On my side, however, presenting John was a delight. He stood 6 inches above me and had Kennedyesque looks and hair, a bonus to what intrigued me and made me proud to introduce him. He was an academic, and I had never before dated an academic.

Several months later, we talked about marriage and it was then that John began to polish me up, and the polishing increased in September when he gave me a ruby engagement ring for our one-year anniversary. He made me aware that I regularly dropped consonants from words and that I used too many clichés. My taste in film was primarily good but some all-time favorites didn’t do me credit, such as Private Benjamin with Goldie Hawn. It seemed I used quite a few words with political overtones — like bork — that some wouldn’t appreciate. And then there was the street where I lived — Goethe. I didn’t pronounce it correctly — that is as he and the Germans would have it pronounced. But a long time ago a Chicago cab driver told me there was no such street as Goethe and when I wrote it out for him said, “Sure, but you’re saying it wrong. That’s Gothee Street.” Who knows streets better than a cab driver? In front of John and friends, however, I thereafter resorted to German.

Throughout this time of our progressing relationship and my upgrading, Paula emerged frequently in conversation and in person. She and John were married seven years so it was only natural for her name to come up, and she was, of course, at many of the academic and cultural events we attended. They still shared close friends from other cities, so we’d also meet for dinner when one of the couples came to Chicago, and Paula would inevitably work in great times the four had shared and get in a remark at my expense. If there was the slightest possibility a conversation might lead to things French, she’d contort it in another direction with admirable aplomb, denying me the one area where I could shine. It was clear she would never forgive me for speaking fluent French without an American accent or for having a job that tainted her former husband’s scholarly esteem. At these encounters Paula always looked stunning, often wearing her long hair straight with one narrow silver-corded braid ornamenting the right side. I couldn’t help but notice she wore John’s favorite perfume, a Dolce and Gabbana fragrance, the same one he had given me for my 31st birthday along with a subscription to TheNew York Times. Eventually, I asked John to do something about Paula’s jabs, but he said it was best not to stir up trouble — which hurt a bit — and I realized I’d have to stop her myself by responding in kind. In December, I began.

We were meeting a couple from Pittsburgh and Paula and her date Stephen at Tesori for dinner before the symphony. Upon arrival I ran into Paula in the restroom using a hairpin to adjust her silver cord. We made a bit of small talk and, as she was leaving, she called back over her shoulder: “Still flying?”

My body tensed and I rapidly finger-combed my hair while watching her profile in the mirror.

“Yes, still teaching?” I said, echoing her tone.

She stopped short with her hand on the door … and walked out. Still at the mirror, I saw my mouth release a long breath, then come together in a smile which sent me back to the bottom of an Austrian ski slope. I was being applauded by ski bums after completing a run of moguls and smiling a triumphant smile, the same one smiling at me now.

Dinner went well even with politics dominating the conversation, not unusual when persuasions are the same. Their passion in discussing the results of the November elections made it easy for me to be a fringe participator with rare interjections to keep me in and out, as it were. After dessert orders, the Pittsburgh couple went to the lobby to call their children and nanny, and Stephen went to the restroom. There we were — the three of us — and I did it. I used the word “candidate,” sans the first “d”. I blushed, stumbling over the breach, and Paula spoke.

“John said you were working on consonants.”

“Paula — ”

“I didn’t realize you reproduced our conversations, John,” I said, looking at him. An icy anger lifted all embarrassment and the mogul skier took over.

“ Can.di.date … can.di.date. There! Now you two need to work on squirrel. Repeat after me: é. cu. reuil — oh never mind, here’s Stephen. Another time.”

My December defense didn’t sit well with John and he excused Paula on the grounds that she was Paula, but before he could say I overreacted — the sure goal of his mesmerizing voice and rhetoric — I reminded him that I had asked him to subdue her and now it was up to me. It was the first time I had not deferred to him, and it took him aback but not as much as what was to come two weeks later on New Year’s Day. He had become edgy during those two weeks and I felt it related to being unable to rely on me anymore for restraint with Paula. It caused me twinges of guilt because I wasn’t sure if he wouldn’t or just couldn’t restrain her and now he had me to boot. I don’t recall what we were talking about on January 1, but it led to my telling him my friend’s aunt lost her bid for a judgeship. “She was borked, plain and simple.” John exploded — I had used the bork word. Then I exploded — and with encyclopedic recall.

“Not so fast, Professor — by the way, that’s a cliché from Private Benjamin, one of my favorite movies — ” and I went on and on, ending with “ … and all those consonants I’ve been putting in to please you? Well I’m taking them all out again.” I don’t think I forgot a single upgrade and John stared at me and I stared back, both with wide-eyed disbelief.

We hardly saw each other the next few weeks. I had bid my flight schedule in order to be free for a performance at The Logan Center that I had a deep interest in attending. It would be an evening of songs and poems by Robert Burns, a poet dear to my heart, and I even looked forward to drinks afterward with Paula and Stephen and another couple. I could hold my own on Robbie Burns and wanted to. My father used to read him to me, doing the Scottish accent very badly, but I didn’t know it then and thought his rendition fantastic. The weather caused cancellations of several of my return trips and John had a trip himself to Cleveland, but finally we blocked off three days to be together. I spent two of those days and nights at John’s apartment in Lakeshore East, something I rarely did because his one-bedroom apartment did not accommodate my erratic sleep or flying schedules. Things hadn’t jelled for us to where they had been before the recent unpleasant episodes. For one thing, the professor-student side of our relationship was over, and we both knew it, but we were finding a footing and had a wonderful 48 hours. We skated in Millennium Park, wobbling around the ice, and sat in the Park Grille afterwards, drinking wine and watching others skate. We took several long walks on Michigan Avenue braving the cold and wind, went grocery shopping at Mariano’s and ate dinner in, cooking two great ones together. On January 26, the day of the Burns performance, John got up to go to Eggy’s for breakfast with a friend and I lingered, waving good-bye with the ruby-ringed hand that he kissed and placed back under the duvet. Soon after he left, I got up and made coffee and while it perked stood at the living-room window looking out over blue patches of lake that winter couldn’t overcome. On the beach, a bulldog attacked a huge snow sculpture destroying it beyond identification, and two joggers stopped to watch as a couple tried to rein him in. I followed the shoreline up to the planetarium and then came back into the warmth of John’s apartment with its wall-to-wall books and coffee-laden air and breathed in bliss. We had cancelled his cleaning lady the day before so after dressing I tidied up between cups of coffee and glancing at the Times. When I raised the shades in the bedroom and began to strip the bed, something flashed over my eyes. The mattress was down from the rim of the headboard and sunlight rays were interacting with an object behind it. Glitter … glitter … glitter … the silver cord from Paula’s hair.

That evening I stood in front of my bathroom mirror knotting a tartan scarf I bought to wear in honor of Burns and wondering why I couldn’t cry. Before leaving John’s apartment I had readjusted the sheets on his bed, made it, packed my overnight bag, left him a note, and walked all the way to Goethe Street without noticing the cold, my face so numb that I couldn’t return a greeting from the doorman. Inside my apartment I sat on the sofa in my coat and shook from cold and betrayal. I wanted to cry but tears didn’t come.

I took off the scarf, tried it another way, and remembered things, reviewed them, things I hadn’t previously registered. A poem began turning in my mind and I jerked off the scarf and replaced it as it was the first time, then went to my desk for a sheet of old stationery with a picture of me and a sweet old lion, my arm over his shoulders. It was taken in Africa and John said it was one of those “Here I am with someone in someplace” pictures. From a shelf I lifted a book of Burns’ poetry left me by my father and copied the first stanza of a poem.

The Burns presentation was magical and resonated with past and present memories, and the tears wanted earlier came. I brushed at them and John reached for my hand. I let him take it just as I had accepted his kiss in greeting me that evening. It was someone else lending her lips, her hand. After the performance, my plan to plead an early flight, hand him the poem and silver cord and jump into a cab was exchanged for one far better. Stephen had a flu virus and hadn’t come and Raica and Gregory had to leave right after the performance so the three of us cabbed to Michigan and Randolph and ordered Glenlivet in Tavern at the Park. “Ahhh. What an evening!” John said, picking up his scotch and proposing a toast to Burns.

As they sipped their toast, I swallowed all of mine, set the glass down and pulled an elongated silver-wrapped box from my purse. “This belongs to you, Paula.” Their expressions, bemused by my drinking off the scotch, stiffened, and I reached for the poem. “And this … this is for you, John, but it also alludes to Paula.” They were stone quiet as I unfolded the lion stationery and read with the Scottish accent inherited from my father:

The park became a testament to progress, to how things got steadily better over time, like the opposite of entropy, where he had read that things naturally fall apart. (Shutterstock)

IIn the decades that Omeer had lived and worked across from Bryant Park, everything had changed for them both, for the park and for him. Omeer had married and had a son, and the marriage had devolved from love to disappointment to peace, finally settling into something that could be described most charitably as a kind of permanent calm. And the park. Well.

It had always officially been called Bryant Park, but when Omeer first arrived in New York City, the park was dangerous, avoided. His first New York friend, Angelo, who had been hired to polish the brass in the lobby of Omeer’s building, told him that some people called it Needle Park. Angelo was wise, and waved his filter-less cigarette knowingly at homeless people sleeping in the park. “He lives there.” He pointed with the burning end of his cigarette. “He washes in the fountain and uses the bushes as a toilet. You can smell it from here. And some of them push needles in their arms and when they nod off, the needles fall on the ground. It’s a park that grows needles, see?” He laughed, two plumes of smoke pouring from his nostrils like a dragon.

Read all the winning stories from the Great American Fiction Contest 2015:

Omeer, a doorman in a building that looked out on the park, watched from across the street as the prostitutes in stretchy, sparkling dresses came at night and walked on high heels up behind the hedges. It was a dark place in those years, a wasteland.

But none of it upset Omeer, who, as a young man was full of hope, all forward momentum and open arms. New York City, even the park with the dirty condoms and sad women, thrilled him. He had a job and a uniform too, brown with brass buttons, and his tenants did not sleep in the park. His tenants back then were celebrities and artists, nice people who brought him coffee in the morning and seemed embarrassed to have the door held open for them day after day. The building, his building, was beautiful, so elegant with its wide marble staircase and brass elevator doors, polished every month by Angelo and his father. It did not matter that Needle Park was across the street. Omeer’s building was an oasis of kindness and beauty that shamed the park, not the other way around.

The people in the building in those early decades were like Omeer’s family. He knew which one was expecting a grandchild, which one was contemplating divorce. One tenant was a radio personality, another was an artist who always had paint in his hair, and one wrote music for the movies. Imagine that! They thanked him constantly and gave him tips at Christmas.

Omeer used to stand on the top step of the stoop at dawn and watch the park for rats beneath the boxwoods. He knew they were boxwoods because he had asked Mrs. Dennis from the 12th floor. She had been so beautiful then, too, a model for Clairol; her blond hair and face had been so sweet and pretty that Omeer turned away when she said hello. The Dennises were older than Omeer, and he thought of them with respect, as the stars who would play his parents in the movie version of his life, which would be set in New York City, not Iran, where he had been born.

Omeer’s real father had once been a businessman, before they all left Iran and scattered. At first Omeer told him the truth about his work, about the building, the uniform, the clusters of grapes carved above the doorways in the lobby. His father seemed proud, thought it was a good beginning for his son. Omeer imagined his father telling his friends in England, where he had settled, that his son lived in New York City, that his son was a doorman who wore a uniform with polished brass buttons. His father offered Omeer advice on the phone the first Thursday of every month, about saving money and meeting Iranian girls in New York.

After Omeer’s mother died, and it became clear that his father would never come to America, not even to visit, Omeer began to lie to him. His father wanted more for him than a doorman job, which had been fine for a few years, but was no longer enough. When Omeer told him he was looking for a new job, his father said, “Good man! You must always strive to better yourself,” and Omeer remembered then how nice it was to be far away from his father’s knack for success.

Omeer made up stories that his father could share with friends over cards, but Omeer’s honest heart made him an unimaginative and nervous liar. He fabricated interviews he was going on, and outfits the interviewers wore, and because he wanted his father to think kindly of America, Omeer said that some of the interviewers expressed interest in Iran, and one even asked about Omeer’s father, supposedly, which of course no one would ever have done.

This false interview period stretched to months, and in an attempt to keep the stories interesting, Omeer moved the interviews to restaurants, although Omeer had never eaten in a restaurant, other than the pizza place on the corner. He described one interview for his father, saying, “I ordered a steak and it came with three different kinds of potatoes and a bowl of apricots for dessert.” He hesitated. “And pots of tea. Pots of hot, sweet tea.” This was how Omeer thought someone in England by way of Iran might picture an American meal, different in the potatoes, but similar in the apricots and pots of tea.

He saved his money, ironing his own shirts, making cheese sandwiches in his tiny kitchen and eating them standing up with the TV on. He wanted a family, he told his father, and himself. Yes, he would love to have enough money one day to have a wife.

Finally, Omeer felt he had to tell his father that he had gotten a new job from all of these interviews he had gone on. He couldn’t pretend to go on interviews forever, so he said that he had been hired at a bank, even though Omeer knew nothing about finance or banks or what kind of job he’d even get in one. Angelo said, “Tell him it’s in public relations. Everyone works in public relations. Call it PR,” which Omeer’s father seemed to understand, even if Omeer did not. That was early still, in his first decade in New York, when Omeer made it a habit to sweep the sidewalk in front of the building very early, before his tenants even woke up, without even being asked.

It was after Omeer became a make-believe public relations agent at a bank that the park across the street began to change in earnest. It got roped off with police tape, and in rumbled cranes and dump trucks, dumpsters and jackhammers. Omeer and Angelo kept track of the tearing down and the carting away and then watched as the park was rebuilt. For four entire years the park was a noisy mess. Omeer and the other doormen swept and mopped every day to keep the dust from polluting their marble lobby.

Omeer read about the renovations in the paper. They were planning on lowering the park to ground level. Astonishing. Impossible. The papers said it was dangerous to have a park up higher than the street, because good people were too scared to go in. “If it’s not at eye level,” Angelo explained to him, “the police can’t look in. It’s like a secret world where all sorts of things can happen. You don’t want to know.” Angelo shook his head, took off his work hat and rubbed his hands through his hair to show how upsetting it was in there.

When Angelo’s father retired, Angelo was put in charge of the family business, polishing the elevator doors, the brass bannisters that looped up the grand marble staircase, the handles on the front doors. He and Omeer stood outside so that Angelo could smoke, and later, after Angelo left, Omeer would sweep up the filter-less cigarette butts and matches he’d left on the ground.

Omeer read to Angelo from the newspaper about the park, while Angelo commented. “People hide in the park,” said Angelo.

“Right,” said Omeer, “the addicts and the hookers.” He tried to sound disdainful, but it didn’t work and he was embarrassed that he had said the word hooker out loud. Angelo had disdain for specific things: for sloppy carpentry, and for people who ate pizza while they walked down the street, but Omeer couldn’t muster genuine disdain. It simply was not in his nature, although he tried.

When the construction was finally done and the dust was hosed off of the block, when the park had been successfully lowered, Omeer called it a work of art. “It’s magnificent,” he would murmur to his tenants as he held the front door for them and swept his hand across the vista, the marble handrails, the full flowerbeds. He realized he was bragging as though the park were his, and he blushed over and over again, but he couldn’t stop paying compliments to it.

Men in green jumpsuits came next and put in more plants, thousands of them along with full-grown London plane trees. Stonemasons came too and fixed the paths and stone walls. Old statues were polished and new statues went in. Now, years later, gardeners were in the park every day in the spring and summer, and even into the fall, planting begonias and digging up daffodils that had just finished blooming, slipping hoses into each pot of flowers until the water ran over the top and soaked the slate beneath. There was a man in a green uniform whom Omeer knew by sight. He walked all day long pushing a garbage can on wheels. If someone let a napkin fall to the ground, the man was there, seconds later, to put it in his pail. If a leaf fell from a tree, he caught it.

The park became a testament to progress, to how things got steadily better over time, like the opposite of entropy, where he had read that things naturally fall apart. It made Omeer tremendously hopeful, about the park, about his life, about humanity. What they had done to the park was a triumph over entropy. He said that to Angelo, who shrugged.

Omeer got married the year the restaurant went into the park. What a shock it had been to his tenants to learn that there would be a place to have lunch and dinner right there, steps from their front door, butting up against the back of the New York Public Library. Mrs. Dennis from the 12th floor said, “It’s like living at Versailles,” which Omeer had heard of. It made everyone in the building stand up a little straighter to have a park so lovely.

On Thursday nights the restaurant hosted a singles’ night where skinny men and women in their tight business clothes came in waves. Omeer could see them through the glass of the front door, laughing with their mouths wide open, leaning in to one another, talking into their phones when their dates went to the rest room. Always busy, always important.

He walked over and studied the menu that hung in the window, and saw a bottle of wine for sale for $47. He felt rich just seeing that, proud that they thought so highly of themselves. The neighborhood had become as special as Omeer’s beautiful marble-and-brass building, as if the building had finally succeeded in making the park behave.

He cut out newspaper articles about the park and sent them to his father, telling him that he went to the restaurant there for business lunches, that the bank let him put it on his expense account. He wished he hadn’t lied to his father about being a banker, because he wanted to tell him how he had just been promoted to superintendent of the building, a big step up. His father would probably have been proud, would have congratulated him. When he got the promotion, Omeer had his doorman uniform cleaned professionally. He hung it in its dry-cleaning bag in the back of his closet in case he ever needed it again.

Omeer’s wife was American, with enough Persian blood in her family history for him to consider her essentially Iranian. She was younger than he was, and shy when they first met. She moved into his apartment with him, the little one bedroom he had bought on the top floor when prices had been dirt-cheap. She bought paint the color of bricks and pomegranates and painted the walls. She put out a vase of fake flowers that looked real. To Omeer, she had the eye of an artist. He encouraged her in all of her early tentativeness. He took her to the park on his day off and showed her the menu hanging in the restaurant window, pointed at the $47 bottle of wine listed there, and they turned to each other and made shocked faces.

One day, a carousel appeared in the park, and reporters wrote stories about it, which Omeer cut out. But by then, his father had died and Omeer put the clippings from the newspapers in the bottom of his sock drawer with a heavy heart. It was the same year that his wife, grown less shy by this time, gave birth to their son. Progress, as it always had for Omeer, outweighed the setbacks. He had a son now. He had a family of his own.

And then, soon after that, at no particular moment, without being definite or clear, at a time seen only in retrospect as a moment, a year later or maybe two or three after the birth of his son, the pendulum of Omeer’s life which had been swinging steadily forward along with the good fortune of Bryant Park, halted, stuttered, and began, ever so slowly, to swing backwards, as every life does eventually. As his up-hill resolved itself eventually into a downslope, the pendulum of the park continued its seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory.

As he grew older, Omeer had begun to worry about his graying hair. He became afraid of closed spaces, and in his late 40s began to sleep with the blinds open to let in the street light, fearful of the coffin-feeling of waking up swallowed by darkness. It annoyed his wife, who liked to sleep without interruptions from light or noise or, by then, from a hand reaching out for her in the night.

Omeer, unlike his wife, found sweetness in interruptions. Everything else was just a list of chores that repeated with the days of the week. Interruptions were the music. Omeer wanted to please his wife, and this made him worry about eating too much salt and drinking too much caffeine. He worried about his blood pressure because she told him to. “We’re getting old,” she said, filing down the nail on her index finger, although she did not look old. He had seen her gray hairs one morning over breakfast, but by that night, her hair was black again. “It’s time you began to take care of yourself, Omeer.” He liked it when she said his name.

Omeer was aware of his age. His tooth ached. His knee ached, but still he was surprised, over and over again, by his reflection in the glass front door of the building. He expected to see his shiny black hair, his eyes smiling back at him, but was forced instead to ask, “Who is that old man?” followed by, “Ah, this is who I’ve become.”

All of New York City had changed too as Omeer grew older. Midtown had been “cleaned up,” but the park, its transformation had been unimaginable, breathtaking, and Omeer had quietly borne witness as they began to offer free yoga classes in the park and French lessons. They held poetry readings and chess tournaments there. In summer they showed movies and offered free juggling classes. Juggling classes!

One winter it was announced that the park would house a skating rink. His wife didn’t believe him at first. “They can’t fit a skating rink in that little park,” she said. So he brought her there, with their boy who was still in her arms then. They were both stunned, but there it was. “Visionaries,” Omeer said. He and his wife clutched their son, making a fragile little family unit. They watched the people wheeling around the rink, bundled in their new clothes from the GAP, spotlights shining down on them as if they were gods. Omeer and his wife looked at each other and laughed then. It was not just a dream, Omeer knew, because the next year the rink came back and brought with it a Christmas tree as tall as a skyscraper. It took a truck with a ladder on it to hang the star on the tree’s top.

As the park and the neighborhood blossomed, however, the kindness of the people seemed pushed to the side, as though kindness was the price that had to be paid for progress. Omeer, then, looked back on those early years, before the park had been renovated, with some nostalgia. Some of his good tenants moved out and new, driven ones moved in. The new ones wore ties and never looked up, and became annoyed quickly. Some of the old tenants remained, and as they aged, he cared for them like he would have cared for his own father, helping them into cabs, carrying their mail upstairs for them, bowing a tiny bit when they came in.

Mr. Dennis, for example, used to ride his bicycle all over Manhattan. He had been famous then on the radio, and Omeer told people, “He is an excellent man, a perfect man.” But Mr. Dennis had grown old and slow like everyone else, and had finally collapsed in the lobby, nearly killing Omeer with shame and worry. He knelt next to him, murmuring, “Oh, Mr. Dennis, Mr. Dennis, I’m so sorry,” too shy to take the man’s hand. The people he admired disintegrated like everyone else, and it broke Omeer’s heart. No one was immune.

Filling the park with flowers and trees and folding chairs, making it so beautiful, brought smart, angry tenants to Omeer’s building — lawyers and traders from Wall Street. The new board president wore blue ties that were tied too tightly around his fat neck. His face was always red, strangled by his own ties, like a balloon about to pop. He looked at Omeer with suspicion, as though Omeer wasn’t working hard enough, which caused Omeer to feel confused and apologetic. He took such pride in his work. Angelo told him only to sweep up when tenants were watching so they could see how hard he worked. It wasn’t terrible advice.

A hotel went in next door to Omeer’s building, and a magazine shop on the other side, next to a French coffee shop that sold pepper grinders and extra-virgin olive oil. The tenants got fancier too, wanted more things, had more packages delivered and cleaning women and guests arriving. People moved in and out more frequently.

Angelo still came, but they refused to raise his fee when they required him to polish the marble floor in addition to his other jobs, and so he was always in a rush too, like everyone else. The board president with the red face and tight neckties told Omeer that they were letting go of one of the other doormen, “to cut costs.” Omeer would have to do his superintendent work during the day now, get his uniform out of the closet again to work occasional overnights, and “share the burden” as the board president told him, not making eye contact with Omeer. They didn’t care that Omeer had a little boy. Times were hard. If he wanted to stay, to keep his apartment, this is what he’d have to do. Omeer considered it a demotion.

By the time Omeer’s boy could make his own bowl of cereal in the morning without spilling the milk, Omeer’s wife had lost her reticence entirely. Omeer became aware that his wife and son pitied him, and sometimes were angry at him for making them pity him, back and forth, pity, anger.

Omeer’s hair had begun to come in gray by his temples, and his wife was bored at home, now that their boy didn’t need much from her. She had friends too, American friends, and she told Omeer that she wanted to go back to school. So Omeer smiled, nodded, and mortgaged the apartment, the one that he had paid off completely, and he sent his wife to design school at Parsons. She took his hands in hers. “Thank you, Omeer.” He loved it when she said his name. He had made her happy.

She studied hard and came home exhilarated. He was glad for her as if she were his growing daughter. When she graduated, he and their son went to the ceremony. At the coffee shop afterward, with her much younger school friends, one of them said, “The economy is not good for designers just starting out.” His wife had shrugged.

She got a new hairstyle, even made her clothes for a bit on a sewing machine Omeer bought for her, but soon after she graduated and found the reality of getting a job to be quite different from the dream, she became disenchanted by the fashion shows that were still held in the park then.

“Oh!” she said, “The beep beep beep of those trucks backing up! How do they expect people to live here?”

After being demoted, Omeer went three years without a raise. Their bills went up, though, and they had a mortgage now. His wife was forced to take a part-time job at a dry cleaner’s downtown, to her great dismay. He knew that her failure was his failure.

The board president with the blue ties and red face explained that they couldn’t give raises, and not to expect one any time soon, either. “There are plenty of people who’d be happy to do your job for half of what you make,” he told Omeer, which struck Omeer as probably true. He worked hard, though, and loyalty should count for something. Shouldn’t it?

As his financial strains intensified, Omeer made sure to remain kind. It was not his wife’s fault that she had married a man who would remain a doorman forever. When she came home with new lipstick, he told her how pretty she was. He did not want anything to make him like the board president with the tight ties. Being kind made him feel better. He loved how smart his wife was, how much she seemed to know. He liked her new long nails, and the way she tapped them gently against her coffee cup in the morning as she read the paper.

He felt guilty about his own graying hair, imagined that it embarrassed her and their boy. He asked her if she wanted him to dye it black and she laughed. “Why bother?” she said. He felt her recoil from her own comment, and she added, “You look distinguished like this.” Omeer knew that she gave him the compliment because she didn’t love him anymore. It wasn’t her fault. Love just grew or failed, and her love for him had stalled out.

One day, his son came to him with a flyer from middle school that read “Summer Music Camp.” He had been studying the saxophone, which caused Omeer distress. He didn’t want the boy to practice when it would disturb tenants. But now this. He didn’t have the $500 for music camp but wanted to say yes to the boy. He said, “Money’s tight this year,” and he saw the boy’s eyes get small and suspicious.

“Mom gets to go out all the time,” the boy said.

“Yes?” said Omeer.

“You are just a cheap-skate,” the boy said, and Omeer recognized the term as something his wife used.

Omeer was so ashamed that he went to the bank the next morning and took the $500 out of his almost-empty savings account. He told his son that he could go, that he had found the money. The boy shrugged, not believing him. “No,” said Omeer, “I mean it. I am not a cheap steak.” He knew immediately that he’d said it wrong. He made mistakes when he was nervous. He had pictured the conversation going so much better, had imagined that his boy would smile and thank him for his generosity, but now Omeer felt frantic and hopeless and embarrassed. The boy rolled his eyes and sighed derisively, and something came up out of Omeer’s stomach and into his throat that he couldn’t control. He didn’t realize what he was doing until after he had slapped the boy BAM! across his cheek.

They stared at each other while the slap reverberated. Omeer knew it had happened because his hand stung, and because the boy’s cheek bloomed pink. He wanted to apologize, wanted to beg the boy not to tell his mother, but instead Omeer took the elevator to the basement and stood in the dark near the incinerator, catching his breath, keeping the tears that gathered inside his eyes.

It was the summer of the slap that someone hired pianists to play music during lunch hour at Omeer’s end of the park. The piano was on wheels so it could be moved around. Pianists came every weekday, a new one each week, and sat down at the piano with a flourish, playing show tunes and jazz and sometimes classical to entertain the crowds. Omeer took his lunch there almost every day. He listened right until the end, even if there was an encore, and then he’d rush across the street, up to his apartment, change into his doorman’s uniform, and be at the front desk for the 3 o’clock shift.

Omeer recognized the park employees who cleaned the fountain who would sometimes stop and listen to the music too, leaning on their brooms. Their uniforms were green, like the color of the leaves, as though they grew there in the park, the workers.

He became aware of a woman who visited the park every Tuesday. She dragged a suitcase, wrapped entirely in Saran Wrap, and several purses, all wrapped in cellophane too. She wore a rain hat tied under her chin, and her lipstick went outside of the lines on her lips up to her nose almost. She would settle in by the piano and arrange her purses on separate chairs. Then she would unwrap a sandwich from a piece of tin foil and eat it.

She never made a sound, never caused a disturbance, always cleaned up after herself. She and Omeer were companions of sorts on Tuesdays that summer. As Omeer would be getting up to leave at the end of each Tuesday concert, she would be stacking her purses back on her suitcase and wheeling off toward home, her plastic kerchief tied tightly under her chin. She even pushed the chairs back in.

Omeer looked forward to that hour, rain or shine. It became his club, his piece of the park where he was better off than some, and not as well off as others. Even though he never spoke to people there, outside of a polite nod, he felt they were his friends, a kind of family that might have existed given better circumstances. How much they would like him if they knew him, he thought. How kind he’d be to them, laughing at their jokes. They wouldn’t know that he was a disappointment, because he wouldn’t tell them. He would not divulge how much money he owed, how he owed more on the apartment than it was worth, that his wife worked part time at a dry cleaner’s. They would not know about him slapping his son, or hiding in the basement afterward. They would know the Omeer that he wished to be — kind, generous, loyal, appreciated.

He had a favorite table in the shade — close enough to hear the music but far enough away to watch the people, who came in colored scarves and high-heeled shoes and danced with their children under the pale green branches of the plane trees. They all spoke different languages, and like chips of glass in a kaleidoscope, whatever way they happened to fall, Omeer found beautiful — like his wife and son when they didn’t know he was watching them.

When the long, hot month of August came, it brought a new woman to the piano concerts. She came barreling in one day, her shiny black hair pulled into a ponytail. Her clothes were runner’s clothes, skintight and lime green. Her enormous fat rolls spilled out from underneath her shirt, smooth and round as a wet otter. Omeer was charmed. Her cheeks were round and glossy, and she shone, as though she had rubbed her skin with oil. She seemed quite alive. When Omeer pointed her out to Angelo one day, Angelo said, “She looks like a Samoan. I’ve read about them. They paddle canoes in the Arctic.” Omeer looked up Samoan on his son’s computer and was astonished at how wrong Angelo had been, but from then on Omeer thought of her as “the Samoan” anyway.

She came after that every so often, and Omeer was glad when she showed up, like a mountain had rolled in to keep the wind and sun off of his back. One day early on, she had a tight lemon-yellow shirt on that did not cover her belly, a strip of which was revealed, the color of polished teak. She put her belongings on one of the round tables and stood next to it, doing stretching exercises. Every time she reached up, her belly, hanging over her pants was exposed, rich and coffee-colored. She looked like a warrior to Omeer, or a fertility goddess.

She sat then and pulled a see-through plastic container full of sliced mangoes out of a bag. She burst with vitality, eating fruit for lunch, doing stretching exercises, her new sneakers a glowing talisman for physical fitness. It all seemed very Samoan to Omeer. She ate the mango with her fingers, licking them after each slice. She took a Wet-Nap out of her purse when she was done and carefully wiped her hands. Fastidious. Natural.

Each time she arrived, she stretched until her belly button was exposed. And when she stopped reaching, the shirt stayed up while she sat and ate her mangoes. Omeer was giddy over how unselfconscious she was, how brave and relaxed and accepting of her own self. He was so much the opposite that he used mouthwash every morning, every night, after every meal, and still his wife pulled away. But his Samoan, she left her fat belly exposed in the middle of the park, and he was sure that everyone who saw her must love her for her abandon.

One day she looked up from a dripping mango slice and caught Omeer’s eye. She hesitated and then smiled wide to show all of her top teeth. He felt he had been caught staring at her, and he stood up, walking directly out of the park and up to his building, where he saw his reflection in the front door of his building. He was shocked, as though he had just seen himself for the first time in decades. How his eyelids drooped. How tight his pants were around his waist. He remembered a photograph of himself when he had been the Samoan’s age, with a full head of shiny black hair. He had been handsome then, he now realized. His daydreams had allowed him to be mistaken about who he had become. Omeer had thought himself the man who might have known this girl once, been friends with her, if things had been different, if he had not married and accidentally grown old.

The next morning, Omeer went to the deli and bought himself a little container of sliced mangoes, and the cashier gave him a plastic fork. He hadn’t eaten a mango since he was a little boy, and he ate them now for lunch by the piano, one at a time. The mango was strange, fibrous and sweet, and full of vague, echo-y memories from what felt like a life that once belonged to someone else, someone who had lived a hundred years ago. It was not enough food for him, and he knew he’d be hungry that night behind the front desk, and he was disappointed that the Samoan woman wasn’t there to see him.

The next day, at the same deli, Omeer bought himself a box of men’s hair dye, the kind that promised to subtly cover only some of the gray, to make him look just a bit younger. He hid the box in the drawer by his bed and dyed his hair when his wife and son had gone out. Some of the dye splattered on the wall by the light switch. He scrubbed it with his toothbrush and got the spot off, but the toothbrush was ruined.

When Omeer took the towel off of his head, he wasn’t certain, but he sensed he looked different, very subtly so. It made his eyes look more blue, he thought, turning his head from side to side in front of the mirror. It left some of the gray, maybe almost all of it, he couldn’t tell, which he found tasteful. He had been worried that the change would be alarming, too severe, but it wasn’t. How could anyone accuse him of dyeing his hair when there were patches of gray still in it?

He wrapped his toothbrush and the box from the hair dye in a plastic bag, and instead of throwing it down the garbage chute by the elevator, he carried it down and put it in a garbage can on the street. He went back to the deli to get mangoes for lunch again. Yes, he had been hungry the night before, but perhaps it was not the end of the world to be a bit hungry. He could stand to lose a few pounds, and mangoes were delicious, he had decided. They tasted the way perfume smelled.

To his delight, the Samoan girl was already there when Omeer took his seat. The pianist was playing something that sounded like a show tune, and a little girl was twirling to the music. A faint chill was in the air, which reminded Omeer that yet another fall was coming. He waited for his Samoan to see him, wondering if she would notice his hair. When she did finally look, he held up his plastic container of mango like a prize to show her, and she smiled and held her container of mango up too, like a toast. He purposefully did not look in her direction again, so that she would know he was not trying to be intrusive, filled with reigned-in joy as he was.

Omeer was working the door when his son came in that evening. The boy was carrying his saxophone case in one hand, said, “Hi,” and lingered. The lobby was quiet and the sun was still up, but weakly.

“How was camp today?” Omeer asked.

“OK,” the boy said, not looking at him.

“Would you like to eat your dinner down here behind the desk with me?” He hadn’t asked him to do that since the slap, over a month ago. He hadn’t apologized either, although he was beside himself with complicated regret.

“OK,” said the boy, “but I have to practice first,” and it was agreed that he’d bring his plate down with him after practicing and they would sit together, hidden behind the marble front desk while the boy ate.

“Have you ever tasted mango?” his father asked him when he came down. It was dark outside now, and the boy said he hadn’t. “I have some left over from my lunch. It’s lovely.”

The boy took a bite and closed his eyes. “It tastes like a pine tree,” he said, and his father was proud of him for that. It sounded like poetry to Omeer, like something a smart boy would say.

There were people coming and going, and Omeer had to get up several times to let them in or out. He turned the little TV on for the boy to watch, with the sound turned way down, but the boy turned it off again and read his book that he had carried down under his dinner plate.

When Omeer sat down again, the boy said, “You look different,” and smiled a little at his father. Omeer remembered with shame slapping the boy’s soft, round cheek.

He said to the boy, “Don’t worry about me, OK? Soon you will be better than I am, and remember that I want that for you. I want you to be better than me.” He looked at his boy, at his shiny black hair, at his face turned up to Omeer. “You mustn’t feel bad when you surpass me.” The boy might not understand now, thought Omeer, but he’d remember and understand later, maybe. The boy shrugged and, folding down the page of his book, turned the TV on so that a picture sprang up. “I look different to you?” Omeer asked him.

“Your eyes or something,” the boy said, staring at the TV screen. He turned to look at his father for a moment. “Your eyes don’t look so tired.” He turned back to the television.

A woman in a large hat came to the door and asked to be announced to Mrs. Jacobs on the seventh floor, but Mrs. Jacobs didn’t answer Omeer’s call.

“Jesus Christ,” the woman in the hat said, sighing deeply and staring off above Omeer’s head. “So now what am I supposed to do?”

“I’m terribly sorry,” said Omeer, aware that he was apologizing to this woman who meant nothing to him and that he had not apologized to his son. He felt the boy watching and wondered how his boy would come, finally, to think about his father.

“I am truly sorry,” Omeer said to the woman. He bowed a little to show how sorry he was, but still she looked angry and wasn’t turning to leave.

She seemed like tangible evidence that his currency was continuing its devaluating slide. Omeer had failed his wife, had slapped his son, had gotten himself in debt for nothing, and now he stood apologizing to strangers. His wife only smiled at him in her sleep now, and he was not allowed to share her bed anymore.

Mrs. Jacobs from the seventh floor came in the front door finally and calmed the woman with the hat down, leading her out into the park. He could hear the woman in the hat say, “Jesus Christ,” and he heard Mrs. Jacobs say, “It’s not his fault, Mary! God!” She rolled her eyes conspiratorially over her shoulder at Omeer, and he smiled, relieved.

The boy pretended to be watching TV, but Omeer knew he had witnessed the small disturbance and his father’s ineffectiveness.

“What a lucky man I am,” Omeer said, tears standing up in his eyes. This was as close as he could come to saying that he was sorry, for the slap, the debt, his position in the world, for being unloved by the boy’s mother. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and the boy allowed it to stay there a moment before shrugging it off.

The piano music continued into the fall. The woman with the purses wrapped in Saran Wrap continued to come every Tuesday, and Omeer wondered where she would go for the winter. Who would understand that, although once her shoes had been on the wrong foot, she deserved a place to sit on a Tuesday afternoon to feel like she was not alone?

His Samoan came only once in September and she was with a friend, a co-worker maybe. Omeer was so happy to see her that he jumped up without thinking and tipped his little folding chair over. He righted it and fled the park, his face warm, tremendously glad to have seen her.

He saw her for the last time in October when she showed up for the final piano performance of the year. She had on a long sweater that came below her knees over her tangerine-colored Spandex outfit. She was pushing a wheelchair with an old man in it. The man was unmoving and listing sharply to one side. The Samoan’s robustness and polish made the man in the wheelchair look chalky and frail like a dried white leaf.

She sat down in a chair just a few tables over from Omeer, and he could hear her talking softly to the man. She took care of him, Omeer realized. This was her job. The pianist came out, a jacket on against the chilly October afternoon. It was a Tuesday, Omeer knew, because the Saran Wrap lady was there, placing her purses on chairs like she was having a tea party and each purse was a guest. His Samoan pulled a sleeve of Oreos from her purse and put one in the old man’s hand, pushing his fingers together so he wouldn’t drop it. She whispered loudly in his ear, “It’s a cookie. You can eat it.”

She stood up behind him and patted down his hair with her colossal hand very gently, smiling down on him. The music started. It was classical, gorgeous, complicated music. It felt like a party. For a moment Omeer enjoyed his place in the park and forgot his debt, the way he embarrassed his son, his wife’s dismissiveness, the board president’s complaints. He felt these people in the park, the man pushing the garbage can and catching every fallen leaf, the woman with the wrapped purses, these were his friends too or, if not his friends exactly, well, they shared something.

His Samoan was tapping on the old man’s shoulder, swaying to the music. Omeer could see her enormous rounded calves like half-melons beneath her long sweater. He could see his building just beyond her, and a wedding party emerging from the hotel next door to it. They served coffee there for $9 a cup. He had asked the hotel’s doorman. Nine dollars a cup. Imagine that, and people paid it.

The two men who had cleaned out the coins from the fountain earlier were there, whispering to each other, their heads close together, laughing, leaning on their brooms. The wind was in the piano player’s hair and made his smile look like it hung under a white cloud. There was a mother with her child asleep in its stroller, completely limp, while the mother texted on her phone to someone who was far away.

Omeer thought of those people in the paper who had lowered the park decades before. They had been visionaries. They had. As everything fell away, his savings, his marriage, his hair, Omeer knew he was still tremendously lucky. Lowering the park had, despite reason and cost and common sense, made the park into a palace, Omeer’s palace. Here he sat amidst the swirling leaves, knowing that he would be back in spring, right here to listen to the music with his companions, the park like a cradle, rocking them all together. Incredible.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/omeers-mangoes.html/feed10Sideshowhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/sideshow.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/sideshow.html#commentsWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=105517On a trip to Coney Island, an alienated father and son renew their bond.

Brown-tipped leaves hung between leaves clinging to their last shades of yellow and the sky was gray and flat, and the air metallic. Luc watched a squirrel flick its tail at the rust while his cereal sat untouched on the table behind him. He’d already dressed himself and for a second I missed the days when I could help him with that. His shirt was buttoned to the collar.

All summer, he’d begged me to take him to Coney Island. Now fall was almost over and still we hadn’t gone and I could tell he’d begun the slow process of letting hope go and turning against me. He was just like his mother in that way, holding so many small things against me.

“Change your clothes,” I said. “I’m not taking you to school.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re going somewhere else.”

He turned back to the squirrel and it leapt away, landing on the nearest tree and running vertically down the trunk, leaves shaking in its wake. Luc wanted me to beg, but he wasn’t going to get what he wanted.

“You heard what I said, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“Then don’t pretend like you didn’t.”

I watched him walk in sock feet down the hallway to change out of his uniform. Neither of us liked mornings. I think he learned from me how sensitive to be. Lately I’d noticed him smelling my coffee, which meant he was getting a taste for it, which was bad because he was already small for a 10-year-old.

Caffeine would stunt his growth and keep him from playing sports in middle school. Then again, maybe he wasn’t that kind of kid. I’d been made fun of when I was his age. Back then everyone just chalked it up to being boys.

I moved our bowls to the sink and rinsed them, holding my hands under the water to warm my fingers. Then I called the office and told them I was sick, and asked my coworker if he would process my orders this once, but I could tell he was busy. A wave of guilt rose in my chest and I decided to fill the smaller Thermos for Luc just for today. A little bit wouldn’t hurt him and he was old enough to practice moderation.

We packed sandwiches and took the scenic route down Beverley past the historic houses and the row of Hasidic houses where the little boy was murdered the year before. He was only eight and his body had been chopped into bits after a family friend went berserk, later claiming in court that inbreeding in the Hasidic community was to blame for his insanity. The boy’s feet were found in a freezer.

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Luc carried the Thermos by its handle and every hundred feet or so stopped to drink from it and let the steam warm his face. People passed us on the way to the train and I could tell Luc was feeling proud to be the only one of his friends not on his way to school that morning. After his fourth time stopping, I told him to drink slowly.

“If you drink fast, it’ll make you nervous.”

“I know.”

“Your mother liked coffee,” I said.

In the evenings, I’d walk around our apartment finding half-full cups with cigarette butts floating in them, which she’d forgotten during the day while she was writing, and she wrote everywhere. I’d leave them by the sink and wait for her to wash them herself, but after a few days they’d still be there, and I’d finally do them without saying anything about it, thinking erroneously that she had avoided doing them while knowing I couldn’t stand it, possibly to enrage me. It was one of the things we fought about in the end.

Our fights were circuitous and fruitless. I accused her of being avoidant and she accused me of being passive aggressive. I accused her of immaturity and she accused me of always trying to control her. I accused her of inconsideration and she accused me of manipulation and secrecy. Now it all seemed so stupid: just a lot of wasted words and wasted time.

“Last time we went to Coney Island, remember how the Wonder Wheel stopped at the top because that girl was sick?”

“That was scary, wasn’t it?”

He nodded.

We passed a cluster of Bangladeshi men conferring outside the fresh market and rounded the corner to the F train, descending a flight of concrete stairs covered in pigeon droppings and cooked rice, and receipts floating on the warm, rising air. In the station, Luc waited by the turnstiles while I refilled our MetroCards, and we continued on to the platform and stood near the benches. All the seats were taken.

We watched an older man stand and walk a few feet down the platform. A woman in heels took his place with her purse on her lap, scrolling through her iPhone. Her hair was tied at the back in a simple knot, from which some locks had come loose, and she wore a thin, gold band on her finger, but otherwise no jewelry. Her eyes were small and tired, staring down at the screen.

“Do you like any girls right now?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“Any guys?”

He looked at me. “No way.”

I looked back at him sideways and laughed. Luc didn’t think it was funny.

“Just asking.”

“I’m not like that.”

“I wouldn’t care if you were.”

He leaned forward to look down the tracks and I pulled on his hood to keep him from falling. A breeze floated into the station lifting a few strands of the woman’s hair from her suit jacket. All of us approached the doors as the train slowed to a stop, and we stepped into the cold, white light. Luc and I took a bench at the back of the last car. He stood to watch the tracks rush away behind us as we pulled south, entering the dark of the tunnel.

Even before Luc was born, we read to him every night. We stocked a bare-wood shelf with the books our parents read to us when we were little, and others we picked up at the bookstore around the corner. Quiet titles like Where the Wild Things Are and The Velveteen Rabbit were our favorites, including Luc’s. Even when he was too young to understand the stories, he’d lie down to listen to us read and play with his feet, always falling asleep before we got to the end.

There was something about The Velveteen Rabbit that got me every time: how loving a thing makes it real. But it doesn’t just stop with love, because when the rabbit becomes real, then it has to go away. The boy sees him again in the woods, at the end, and they look at each other before the rabbit disappears again. The boy’s life goes on as if the rabbit were never there.

And there is the fact that the rabbit has a body that can die, which he never had before. Only then can he be real.

On the train, Luc leaned against my shoulder, reading a horror novel.

“Is that scary?”

He nodded.

“What’s it about?”

He shrugged.

“You don’t know?”

“No, I know.”

Once, I caught him packing a book in his lunchbox, and when I asked him if he was really going to read it, he said, “I don’t know. I just want to have it with me.”

“Do you remember your mother’s favorite book?”

He shook his head.

“Me, either. If I thought really hard, I could remember.”

Luc closed his book in frustration and held it on his lap, glaring at the opposite wall.

“I’m sorry, you’re trying to read,” I said.

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

He stood and walked to the opposite benches, where two women in hijab leaned in opposite directions to let him look at the map. He placed his finger on a dot and traced it south to the water, wobbling as he turned around again and the train came to a stop. Then he sat back down next to me and looked straight ahead, as before.

“What did I say?”

“Nothing. You just talk about her a lot.”

I proposed to Luc’s mother on the Wonder Wheel when she was already Luc’s mother. She said no and we continued to ride in silence, the ground rising and falling beneath us, the car rocking back and forth in the air. Afterward, I went home alone. She called me that night to see if I wanted to talk about what happened, but I didn’t think there was anything more to say. She knew how I felt and I knew how she felt.

A few months later, we were living together. Luc was teething and sick all the time, and crying. We slept very little, and made love very little. I was jealous of the attention she gave Luc, as irrational as I knew that to be. She was a good mother, but more than that, she was a good human. She never allowed herself to be consumed by the role of motherhood.

She wrote just as often as before, but at different times of the day: early mornings, and while Luc was napping. Meanwhile, things like showering fell by the wayside. She never acknowledged my jealousy, though I knew she knew I felt it. She thought it was childish. She was right.

All of the rides were still as we approached from down the street, past our favorite pizza parlor, and the sky overcast as if it would rain, which meant that soon it would snow. Luc pulled my hand back in the direction of the pizza and we ordered two slices then continued on our way toward the water, eating them as we walked.

“I forgot they shut the rides down after Halloween,” I said. “I guess we’ll just play the games. I’m sorry.”

Luc didn’t respond.

“Are you disappointed?”

“No.”

“We can go to the freak show.”

“Sure, OK.”

He finished his pizza and threw the greasy plate in a trashcan as we crossed the road, entered the amusement park, and walked between the stalls. Cold air blew off the beach and the smell of salt mingled with that of hot dogs and axel grease, and fresh trash bags. The pathways were mostly empty save for a few older couples and families of tourists braving the cold, wet, late season.

From a distance, we heard a fuzzy recording of a bugle and a demented laugh, and made our way toward it. We found the building brightly painted in traditional circus posters and banana-yellow background, with loudspeakers shouting about the sideshow. A neon sign advertised “Freaks” and “Strange People.” I paid $15 and we took our seats before a low, red stage in an otherwise empty theater. Luc brought his knees up to his chest and rested his feet on the chair.

“You’re going to make it dirty,” I said.

He put his feet down. We waited.

People filed in and a few minutes later, a man in a black-and-white striped shirt took the stage. He carried a doll the size of his torso in one hand and a music stand decorated with gold fringe in the other. He placed the stand in the middle of the stage, rested the doll on it, and spoke into the microphone.

“Hello everyone, and welcome to the Coney Island sideshow. I’d like to introduce you to my friend Homer.”

“Homo, you idiot,” said the doll. People laughed.

“What?”

“Not Homer; Homo. My name is Homo. And you’re Limp!”

Luc laughed and brought his knees up again, resting his feet on the chair. I didn’t say anything.

“I’m Larry,” said the man in the striped shirt. “Not Limp.”

“That’s not what your wife told me,” said Homo. Uproarious laughter from the crowd. Luc looked at me. I smiled. He smiled and looked back at the stage.

“Homo, what’s this thing you’re wearing on your head?”

“It’s an Indian headdress. I’m Iroqueer.”

“Don’t you mean Iroqouis?”

“No, Iroqueer! I’m a gay Indian!” Laughs.

“And your sister?”

“Oh, she’s from New Mexico, she’s a Na-va-HOE.”

Luc laughed the loudest. I groaned and leaned back in my chair, covering my eyes. I glanced back at the door. A man stood in front of it with his arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe. He smirked at the stage. Luc noticed me looking.

“No, I want to stay,” he said.

“I think this might be too mature for you,” I said.

“No, it’s not! I can handle it!” he said. I motioned for him to lower his voice.

“I can handle it,” he said.

“Fine, but we’re talking afterward.”

He put his feet on the ground and sat up straight, to show me how adult he was.

“Homo, tell the audience about your childhood,” said Larry.

“My father carved me out of the hardest piece of oak in the forest,” he said. “Then he abandoned me. He was made of ASS-pen.”

We played some games afterward and Luc won a goldfish, which he promised to take care of. We bought ice cream and went to the boardwalk to eat it, and sat on a bench looking out at the gray water. Deep in the distance the horizon was blurred, and sea and sky churned together in the low-slung clouds. The air smelled ionic.

A woman jogged past us followed by a golden retriever on a leash tied to the woman’s waist. She kept her hair back with a headband that wrapped around her skull in a tight circle. Her leggings were the brown of the boardwalk with a silver stripe running from ankle to hip. I watched her until she disappeared into a cluster of people, then I couldn’t find her again.

“Remember The Velveteen Rabbit?” Luc said.

“Of course.”

“What happened to it?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not on my bookshelf.”

“You want to read it?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t read that book for years.”

He got up and walked down the boardwalk and found a trashcan, then stopped and looked at me, holding the cone out over it. I nodded and he dropped it inside, apparently finished.

For a long time, we sat staring out at the water.

“Can I tell you something?” he said.

“Of course.”

“You promise you won’t be mad?”

“I promise.”

“I know you’re not my father.”

An artificial melody played in the distance, carried by wind. We were quiet for a long time.

“It’s OK,” he said. “I still feel like you are.”

“I’m glad. You know I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“You are my son, though.”

“I know.”

I reached into my jacket and handed him one of the sandwiches we’d packed that morning, and opened the other for myself. Down on the beach, a couple walked along the line of the water, looking for shells in the sand.

My Uncle Lyle Sims came home from World War II in the spring of 1946, six months after the war was over. He had been badly wounded early in ’45 when the Allies rolled into Germany, and healing his physical wounds took a year in Walter Reed Hospital. His other wounds, the wounds to his soul, did not heal. They remained open.

Aunt Kate and I went to meet his train at Union Station in Memphis. I was 8 then, and I’d been living with her for only a few months, so what little I knew of my uncle came from photographs in her old family album. She showed me pictures of Uncle Lyle and her at their wedding, and he looked like a tough, wiry, and very happy farm boy. She also showed me shots of my parents at their wedding, and for a long time I could not look at them without crying. Both had died within two years of each other—my dad was shot down over the Pacific in 1943, and Mama had died in late ’45 of flu that turned to pneumonia. I became a sad, sickly boy living with my ailing grandmother, and if Aunt Kate hadn’t traveled all the way to Kentucky to take me to their farm near the town of Ethan, Mississippi, I would have ended up in an orphanage.

Instead I was standing there beside her in the Memphis station as we watched Uncle Lyle step down onto the platform. He was carrying his duffle bag and wearing an oversized uniform, and for a moment he stood looking lost and confused until Aunt Kate cried, “Lyle, oh, Lyle!” and ran to him, nearly knocking him down when she grabbed him. For a long time they held each other, not saying a word, while I stood back, wondering how he would react to the strange kid in his house. Finally he lifted his head from Aunt Kate’s shoulder, nodded at me and said, “So you’re Curtis Spence. I hear you’re a big help to my girl here, and I want to thank you.” He patted me on the back and turned again to Aunt Kate. “How do we get home, honey?”

“I’ve got bus tickets,” she answered. “The depot’s down the street.”

My uncle lived for only eight years after he came home, and I never really got to know him man to man. But when we walked out of the train station together, I remember feeling that I was part of an actual family again.

For several years our life together was good. As I grew older I had chores to do after school, and whenever I could I helped Uncle Lyle with the heavy work, plowing the garden, splitting firewood, cutting hay, repairing pasture fences, so that by age 13 I had become a stringy, 6-foot rail of bone and muscle. My uncle and I worked well together, but during his last years he began to have the haunted look of a man who had experienced something terrible, and I came to the realization that, bit by bit, he was turning much of the work over to me. He would observe my comings and goings from an old wooden rocker on the porch, sometimes nodding at me in approval, but whenever I saw a certain vacant expression on his face and a look of pain in his eyes, I felt that he was slipping away from us.

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We had entered the 1950s, and the Korean War produced a minor economic boom. Even small towns were offering work in newly built shoe and shirt factories, and you could almost take your pick of jobs in Memphis. Uncle Lyle and Aunt Kate, though, never thought of moving off the land. He had a small pension from the government, and the farm produced eggs, milk, and meat. Aunt Kate home-canned fruit and vegetables, sold eggs to the Liberty Cash grocery, and with help from neighbor Carrie Polk, who was custodian of the only telephone in our end of the county, made marvelous strawberry and blackberry jams. For my part I tinkered so much with Uncle Lyle’s old pickup that I became a fair-to-middling shade-tree mechanic, and I began doing oil changes and tune-ups on Saturdays at Sam Johnson’s service station. Sam paid me $7 for a 10-hour day, and I always had spending money.

Aunt Kate and I did all we could to make it easier for Uncle Lyle. But his health continued to fail, and by 1952, when I was 15, he began waking up in the middle of the night yelling. It took both of us to hold him in bed until he calmed down and lay back on his pillow. “The war,” Aunt Kate told me, “gave him terrible nightmares.”

She was losing hope for him. Now and then, while he slept, she would open a cabinet drawer and remove a battered notebook and a sheaf of documents. In the notebook she kept records of their income and expenses. The documents—tax receipts, the deed to the farm, burial policies, bank books, paid-up loan papers—more or less represented their net worth. There was also a life policy that Uncle Lyle had bought from Hayden Culver, the local agent for TranSouth Insurance. I watched Aunt Kate as she studied the items, adding up columns of figures in the notebook. The total never seemed to please her.

During Uncle Lyle’s last year he began taking walks alone to the pasture down behind the barn. There was a big oak stump near the stock pond where he sat watching the dusk come, and in the late afternoon coolness Aunt Kate and I usually sat together on the porch waiting for him. One evening she said to me, “Curtis, I want to show you something.” She nodded in Uncle Lyle’s direction. “Maybe it’ll help you to understand him.”

She went into the house, returning with a worn envelope. She pulled out a creased and fragile sheet of paper and handed it to me carefully.

“I wrote him a letter every day,” she said. “He answered whenever he could, but this is the letter he wrote me after he first got to the hospital. I’d like you to read it.”

The handwriting was shaky, but readable:

Honey …

I want to tell you what happened to me. The drs. say it’s okay if I want to do it, and it might help me and them. Most of it they know, but I want you to know, too.

Remember I wrote from Camp Shelby about my friends Ken and Donnie; also a fellow named Tom Fowler. We went thru basic training together and then overseas and to the front. We were on a machine gun when the Germans shelled us. It was pure hell. We got blown all to pieces. I couldn’t believe I was still alive. I was half-buried and couldn’t see. When I could see again, Tom had no head, and Donnie’s legs were gone. He died while I watched him. Ken was screaming at me but I couldn’t help him and he died, too.

Finally I dug out and started walking. I had shrapnel in my back and hip, but I don’t feel it because all I could think of was my friends dead. I walked toward the German lines, hoping they would shoot and I would be dead, too. But the Germans were gone, and troops were minesweeping the road and saw me and took me to the aid station. I’m still alive, but I can’t forget what I saw on that day no matter how much I try. It would be better if I was dead so you could collect my insurance, because I won’t be much good for you or anything else now. The doctors let me write this, but I don’t think it will help.

He signed it, “Your husband, Lyle.”

Aunt Kate watched me as I read. When I finished, I knew the letter told of something truly horrible, yet I could not imagine it. In my world people weren’t blown to pieces. The Korean War newsreels showed only columns of soldiers and distant clouds of smoke, or tanks making dust on the roads, or sometimes long lines of refugees. The soldiers who rode by in the troop trucks waved and smiled at the camera.

I handed the letter back and she slipped it carefully into its envelope. For a while we listened to the cicadas in the oak trees, and finally I said. “I wish that hadn’t happened to him.”

“So do I,” she said. “I wrote him back lots of letters. Told him I loved him and to trust the Lord, mind the doctors and get well. But I guess it didn’t help. His other letters were just notes that never said much. Just that he was doing okay.”

I tried to sound hopeful. “He’ll get better someday.”

“Maybe,” she answered. She sighed and looked intently at me. “But I’ll tell you, Curtis; I think sometimes a man can get a wound so bad it kills him, yet he keeps waking up every morning. I think it’s like that for him.”

Just then we saw Uncle Lyle closing the pasture gate, and as he walked toward us Aunt Kate said, “Maybe he’ll eat something tonight.” She pushed herself up from the rocker and went into the house.

For a long time that night, I lay thinking about the letter, and what Aunt Kate had said about Uncle Lyle living with his wound. He had been living with it for years now; but if she was right, it wouldn’t be long before that terrible dream would come for one last time, and he would not wake up again.

But it didn’t happen that way.

On a cloudy afternoon in September my uncle kissed his wife, waved to me, and walked out the back door. As usual he was wearing his old shooting coat, and Aunt Kate and I figured he was heading to the tree stump by the pond. Thanks to Mr. Slade Walker’s bull, we’d had two new calves that spring, and Uncle Lyle liked watching them at play in the pasture. A few days earlier I’d seen him actually smiling at them.

At the time I had said something like, “They’re a fine pair, ain’t they?”

Uncle Lyle had nodded. “Need to watch ’em, though, around the pond. I saw a moccasin the other day.”

“Probably just a black water snake,” I said.

“No,” he’d replied softly. “Moccasin.”

Then on that last day, 10 minutes after he’d walked out the door, I heard Aunt Kate call out from the front room, “Oh, Lord, Curtis! He took the gun.”

I found her standing before the open door of the cedar closet, a frightened look on her face. The shotgun, an old single-barrel J. C. Higgins .12-gauge, was absent from its corner. It was a dangerous worn-out relic with a hair trigger, and I had been warned from my first days with Aunt Kate never to touch it.

“He wasn’t carrying it when he left,” I said.

“Oh, but he’s slick,” she said. “He knew I’d stop him. I guarantee he slipped out sometime this morning and hid it.” She brought both hands to her cheeks. “Listen,” she said, “go find him. Just stay with him and talk to him. Tell him I said not to load that gun. He’ll listen.”

“Yes, ma’am.

But by then it was too late. I was on the porch pulling on my boots when I heard the heavy boom of the gun. Behind me I heard Aunt Kate cry out, “Oh, my God!” and I jumped from the porch and ran for the pasture. I cleared the fence in one bound while Aunt Kate was stopped at the gate, tugging at the latch.

I saw Uncle Lyle as I rounded the corner of the barn.

He was sitting on the stump, bending forward and rocking slightly back and forth. The shotgun lay on the ground at his feet, and as I approached he turned his eyes toward me and shook his head as if to warn me away. Then I saw the blood.

I said, “Hey, Uncle Lyle. What happened?”

“It was an accident,” he said. “Gun went off.”

I moved to his left side and saw where the pellets had struck him. His canvas shooting coat was bloody. He was holding it tight to his ribs with his hand, his blood seeping between his fingers. Then Aunt Kate came running up and knelt in front of him.

“Oh, Lyle,” she said. “Oh, baby, what have you done?”

He looked at her, blinking, and said, “It was an accident.”

“Well, of course it was.” She placed her hand on his cheek. “It’ll be all right. We’ll get you to a doctor.”

“Sit still now. We’ll talk about it later.” They were talking in a hushed way, as they did in bed on some nights, but I heard every word. She looked up at me and said calmly, “Get over to Carrie Polk’s. Tell her your uncle’s had an accident and we need the ambulance quick!”

“Yes’m,” I said.

I figured cutting across the pasture would be faster than going for the truck, which might not start anyway, so I ran as hard as I could. But it seemed a very long time before I reached Mrs. Polk’s, and it was even longer before the ambulance came, and by the time medics reached him, Uncle Lyle was unconscious. They carried him up the hill on a stretcher while Aunt Kate jogged beside him holding an IV bottle. On the stretcher he looked as small as a child.

She climbed into the back of the ambulance and called, “Curtis, follow us in the truck.”

The old truck started with only one backfire, and I stayed behind them all the way to the hospital in Walnut Grove. They used the siren at first, but then, just outside of town, they turned it off, and I thought, “Uncle Lyle’s dead.” And it was true. He had lost too much blood sitting there with Aunt Kate holding him, and I think she knew he was dead even before we got to the hospital. We sat together in the hall until a doctor, a bald man in a rumpled white coat, came to us and said, “He’s gone, ma’am. I’m very sorry.”

Aunt Kate stared straight ahead. Then she nodded. She didn’t cry then, nor did she cry when we drove back home late that night. She warmed a bowl of vegetable soup for me, ate nothing herself, and was still reading her Bible in the light of a kerosene lamp when I went to bed.

Later, before the sun came up, I heard her cry out from her bedroom, “Oh, Lyle!” Maybe she was awake, or maybe she dreamed and called to him in her sleep. Either way I believe she felt him, maybe even saw him, and was saying goodbye to him.

The summons to the Coroner’s Inquest came by registered mail several weeks after my uncle’s funeral, and I noticed Aunt Kate’s hand shaking as she signed for it.

In essence the letter said:

The following named individuals are required by law to appear at the Office of the Coroner, Layton County Courthouse, on November 9, 1953, to testify concerning the manner of death of Lyle David Sims. Also bring any official documents, law enforcement findings, medical reports, death certificates, etc. that are in your possession and may be pertinent to this hearing.

It was signed: “Charlene Bailey, County Coroner”

Aunt Kate’s name was there. So was mine.

The hearing was two weeks away, and for Aunt Kate it was two weeks of worry. She was sure the reason for the inquest centered on the policy Uncle Lyle had bought from TranSouth Insurance. After the funeral Mr. Culver had given her an “Application for Benefits” form and helped her to fill it out, and she was worried about the policy’s terms. They stated that the company would pay a limited benefit if death occurred within three years of the inception date, but full value after three years, and for accidental death, the double indemnity clause meant that Aunt Kate would collect $10,000. But if the death were a suicide, the beneficiary would only receive the amount that had been paid in premiums.

She said wearily, “I guess those people think he did it on purpose.”

“He said it was an accident,” I said.

She didn’t respond, and I added, “I heard him say it.”

“I know,” she said softly, “But you can’t blame them. Business is business.”

“I’ll tell ’em it wasn’t suicide.”

She sighed. “We couldn’t prove it, though, could we?”

She sounded really despondent, and for a moment I thought of saying that they, not us, would have to prove anything, but I didn’t. I remembered their whispered conversation that day in the pasture; my uncle’s tacit admission that his life had become more than he could bear, and the effort she had made to quiet and comfort him. I remembered Aunt Kate’s earlier words—that a man could be mortally wounded and still live—and I truly believed that if anything other than an accident had killed my uncle, it had to be the war, and to me that made him a hero, not a suicide.

There were several people from Ethan at the inquest: Sam Johnson had closed his station for the morning and sat on the back row in his oil-stained jumpsuit; Mrs. Polk was there, wearing her Sunday hat, and so were others, including Mr. Culver, the insurance agent, sitting beside a blue-suited man who held a briefcase. A jury box on the far side of the room contained six jurors: three sunburned men in short-sleeved shirts, one in bib overalls, and two 50ish women in starched housedresses.

We who had been summoned to testify sat on the front row of the small courtroom: Deputy Tom Blankenship, the officer who responded to Mrs. Polk’s emergency call; Dr. Luke Wendell, the County Medical Examiner, and then the Walnut Grove Hospital doctor who had seen Uncle Lyle at the Emergency Room. Aunt Kate sat beside him, and I beside her. As we watched the court reporter start to unpack her machine, the door behind the front desk opened and a small, bright-blonde woman emerged, smiled at everyone, and sat down in the swivel chair at the desk.

“My name is Charlene Bailey,” she said. “I’m the county coroner, and I thank you all for being here. I promise I’ll do my best to conduct this inquest quickly so you can all get on back home and go about your business …”

She paused, looking directly to us, the witnesses. “Now then,” she said. “Certain questions have been raised concerning the manner of death of a citizen of this county, Mr. Lyle David Sims, and it is my duty to ascertain answers to those questions. So I’m asking all of you who will be testifying to please to stand now and be sworn.”

We stood as a group, and the assistant coroner charged all of us to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Then the first witness, the hospital doctor, sat down in the witness chair and stated his name: “R.W. Caldwell, MD.”

Mrs. Bailey smiled and asked in her soft Southern voice, “Dr. Caldwell, you signed Mr. Sims death certificate, is that correct?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket. “I have a copy of it right here.”

“May I see it, please?”

He passed her the document which she unfolded, studied for a minute or so, and handed back. “The certificate shows the cause of death to be a shotgun wound,” she said, “and the manner of death is accidental.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Dr. Caldwell. “That’s based on the information I had at the time.”

Mrs. Bailey leaned forward and asked, “Have you ever attended any other person who committed suicide or attempted suicide?”

“Yes, ma’am. Several.”

“Is there anything in this case that might cause you to doubt the death was accidental?”

Dr. Caldwell frowned for a moment. “No, ma’am. Usually people who commit suicide do it with a pistol or rifle, and usually it’s a head or heart shot. Mr. Sims’ wound wasn’t necessarily fatal, and he died from shock and loss of blood. It didn’t look to be deliberate to me.”

The Medical Examiner gave testimony about the internal damage to Uncle Lyle’s body: the severe bleeding, graphic details about what the small-game pellets had done to his vital organs. Sitting next to Aunt Kate I felt her body recoil, as if the words were like whip lashes, but the doctor seemed bored by the whole process. I found myself getting angrier by the minute.

Mrs. Bailey said to him, “I assume you examined Mr. Sims’ clothing?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Tell us what you concluded from your examination.”

Dr. Wendell cleared his throat. “The shot came from very close range, penetrating the jacket he was wearing. It left gunpowder residue on the fabric, and in my opinion Mr. Sims would have died quickly if the cloth hadn’t embedded the wound and partially staunched the bleeding.”

“I see.” The coroner looked thoughtful. “So you’re saying his death was delayed because his coat slowed the loss of blood.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Then do you think Mr. Sims committed suicide?”

“He might have,” said the medical examiner. “He just didn’t do a very good job of it.”

I took a quick look at the jury, thinking the ME’s flippant attitude might have been distasteful to them, especially the women. But they seemed to accept it.

Mrs. Bailey looked out at the three people remaining on the front row. “You’re next, please, Deputy.” As Blankenship sat down, she said, “Now, sir, you were the investigating officer at the death scene?”

The deputy nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I examined the weapon and took pictures,” he said. “The gun’s a .12 gauge. Very old. It had been fired that morning, and the empty shell was still in the chamber. There was also blood on the barrel and stock.”

“Where did you find the gun?”

“In the pasture near the pond on the Sims’s place. There was a stump that had bloodstains, too, so I’m sure that’s where the shooting happened.”

“You took pictures, you say? May I see them, please?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He passed her a manila envelope containing a half-dozen black and white pictures, and she studied each for a few seconds, then picked out one and handed it back to the deputy.

“I see various things lying around the stump. Can you tell me what they are?”

The deputy looked closely at the picture. “Well, there’s the gun, some medical packaging, and a wad of blood-stained gauze. Also Mr. Sims’s shirt and coat. The coat had three unused shotgun shells in the breast pocket. I left them in the sheriff’s evidence room, and I sent the gun and the clothing to the ME’s office.”

“Very well. Anything else you want to add?”

She was talking to Blankenship, but she had turned to look at me with a frown of disapproval, because as I listened to the deputy’s testimony I almost fell from my chair. It happened in a flash, a burst of enlightenment, so that when I actually realized what I’d heard I was so jolted with excitement that my chair did a little dance.

The deputy didn’t notice. “No, ma’am,” he said. He gave a nod toward Aunt Kate and me. “I’d just like to say that Mrs. Sims and Curtis there are fine folks, and I’m sorry it happened.”

As Deputy Blankenship stepped away from the witness chair, Mrs. Bailey looked directly at me. “Now—Master Curtis,” she said. “Are you in disagreement with the deputy’s testimony?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, something he said seemed to light a fire under you. Do you have something to tell us?”

I swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes’m, I do.”

The witness chair was just a few steps away, but in the miniscule amount of time it took to reach it, everything came together in my mind. The Bible says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” and that I would never do. I had also sworn to tell, as the clerk said, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” and that’s what I meant to do. But until the deputy’s testimony, I hadn’t known what the truth was, but now I honestly believed it had been revealed, and I would tell the truth, the whole truth as it was made known to me in that split second, and no one could ever make me believe differently.

I took my place in the chair, and Mrs. Bailey looked at me.

“Let’s hear it.”

I took a deep breath and said, “He went to shoot a snake.”

In obvious disbelief she said, “A snake? And where was this snake?”

“It was in the pond.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“Yes, ma’am. Uncle Lyle told me about it.”

At that point I stopped talking to her. I looked out at the spectators, and the people in the jury box, and they were all watching me intently, all eager to hear what I would say, and they empowered me. I raised my voice and started talking straight to them.

“We had some new calves,” I said, “and Uncle Lyle was real fond of ’em. A day or so earlier he told me he’d seen a big moccasin in the pond, and it worried him ’cause the calves played around there. So that morning he did what any farmer would do. He got his gun and went after that snake. But the gun was in awful shape, old and rusty, and it was hard to thumb the hammer back. And if you weren’t careful with it, it could fire without you pulling the trigger.”

I paused to catch my breath. “He hadn’t been well since the war, and maybe he didn’t set the hammer right. He might’ve stumbled or dropped the gun, but somehow it fired and hit him in the side. And I know he didn’t do it on purpose. We only had four shells for that gun—in a box in the closet. The deputy said he found three shells in his coat pocket, which means Uncle Lyle took all the shells we had.” I turned to the coroner. “He wouldn’t have taken all of ’em unless he thought he might need more than one shot. And he might if he was shooting at a snake.” I looked at the people in the courtroom. “If he really meant to kill himself, he would only need to take one shell.”

For a moment everyone, including the coroner, seemed to ponder the logic of that, and then she looked toward the jury box. A stirring was growing among the spectators, and the jurors whispered to each other. Mrs. Bailey lifted a small gavel and tapped gently.

“Let’s be orderly, please.” She turned again to address the jury. “Would you folks like to hear from Mrs. Sims now?”

The jurors looked at each other, and the man in overalls, taking his cue from the others, stood up. “It ain’t necessary, ma’am.”

“I see,” said the coroner. “Are you the foreman of the jury?”

The man looked back at his fellow jurors, who were nodding. “I reckon I am, ma’am.”

“Then would you like to retire and consider the testimony?”

The foreman remained standing, turning to look, one by one, at the other jurors, each of whom in their turn whispered something to him.

He cleared his throat. “We already decided, ma’am. We find the death of Lyle David Sims to be accidental.”

As Aunt Kate and I walked down the courthouse steps, a voice called, “Mrs. Sims. Just a moment, please.”

It was the well-dressed man who had been at the inquest with Culver. He said, “I’m Hector Bennett, an attorney for TranSouth. Mr. Culver will bring your check tomorrow morning if that suits you.” He held out his hand. “Congratulations.”

For a moment Aunt Kate swayed as if she might faint, but she caught my arm, steadied herself and shook the attorney’s hand. She whispered, “Thank you, Mr. Bennett.”

“And congratulations to you, Curtis,” he said. “That snake story beats all. It won the day.” He studied me for a moment, then turned again to Aunt Kate. “Ten thousand’s a lot of money, Mrs. Sims. What will you do with it?”

“Save it,” she said, looking at me. “I want Curtis to go to college.”

“Well,” he said, “there’s a break for you, young man. Have you thought where you’d like to go?”

Never before had anybody asked about my future, and I hadn’t actually thought about it. But I found, much to my own surprise, that I had an answer.

“To law school,” I told him. “I’d like to be a defense lawyer.”

Again Bennett looked at me, giving me a strange half-smile, as if we shared a secret about something that only he and I understood.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” he said as he turned to go. “No, sir. Doesn’t surprise me at all.”

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/nothing-truth.html/feed17Party of Twohttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/party-two.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/party-two.html#commentsWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=105515When a world-weary, middle-aged couple witnesses a young pair kissing in a restaurant booth, it stirs memories of first love and lost love.

Herbert and Marilyn walked into the newest diner in town, The Brown Bag. A yellow GRAND OPENING banner hung the length of the wall behind the hostess stand and a greasy smell of overdone French fries lingered in the air. Herbert trudged to the front and put his name on the list. The hostess said it would be a few minutes. He headed back to the door and plopped down on a bench next to Marilyn.

“Few minutes,” he said. “It’s always a few minutes. Do you have that coupon?”

Marilyn unzipped her purse and spotted the torn piece of newspaper. On it was an illustration of a Dagwood sandwich piled high. The sandwich had cartoon eyes and thin arms and legs; it even sported basketball sneakers. None of it made Marilyn particularly hungry. What did LA people know about delis? Why were people always trying to be something they weren’t? And why was Herbert so cheap? He’d made all this money as a CPA, and here they were only going out to eat because of a coupon. “Yes,” she said. “It’s here.”

Whenever they went out, she realized just how estranged they were. At home, there were so many distractions: She knitted and read her romance novels, and he gardened and worked on an old Moto Guzzi in the garage. They bumped into one another in the hallway and, like co-workers, were always polite.

A waiter dropped a tray of dishes. White plates and tall glasses exploded on the black-and-white tiles. The waiter’s face flushed, but as soon as the clientele applauded, his redness evaporated.

The door swung open and a young man and woman entered. They were holding hands and couldn’t have been more than 20. Marilyn thought the man looked so much like Major, her first boyfriend; the girl didn’t look like anyone Marilyn knew, but Marilyn found her cute with her sundress and strappy shoes. It wasn’t sundress or strappy-shoes weather, but sometimes a woman had to make it the kind of day she wanted.

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The young man really did look like Major, though, with a few 21st century adjustments: His hair was longer and lighter, and his clothes were too big for his frame. His wallet had a chrome chain that connected from one of his belt loops to his back pocket, and he hadn’t shaved in a few days. She never saw Major unshaven. The man had the same dark eyes and subtle freckles on his cheeks. He caught Marilyn staring at him. She smiled. He did the same. Soon after, the young woman went over and put her name down on the list. When she returned to the man’s side, they shared a secret and then a kiss. A peck on the cheek transformed into a soft-lip kiss, and before Marilyn knew it, the young man and woman’s lips had opened and were pulling on each other’s. They shut their eyes and the man moved one of his hands to the woman’s neck. Herbert looked away. The couple stopped. The woman giggled and wiped her lips with the palm of her hand.

“Didn’t know this was a damn brothel,” Herbert said under his breath.

“Herbert! For two!” the hostess called.

Herbert and Marilyn followed the hostess and navigated their way from table to table, even one where some of the waitstaff had assembled and were belting out “Happy Birthday” to a little girl with pigtails. Marilyn blew the girl a kiss.

The hostess showed them to a red vinyl booth.

“Do you have a table?” Herbert asked. “I just can’t stand booths. Always too far from the table.”

The hostess scanned the restaurant and tucked a pencil into her bun. “No, none available right now, but I can put you back on the list and let you know when something opens up.”

“That’s all right,” Herbert said. “I’m hungry.” He slid into the booth.

“My grandpa hates booths, too,” the hostess said. “Enjoy.” She headed away from the table and back to her station.

“Always someone’s grandpa these days,” Herbert said.

“What do you expect? We’re old,” Marilyn said.

“Kids are too honest. That’s all. Back in my day, we said what was polite, not what was true.”

“Where are the menus?”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re just getting what’s offered on the coupon.”

“I wonder if they have sweet-potato fries. I read that they’re actually kind of good for you.”

“Where the hell’s the waitress?”

The affectionate couple was shown to the booth opposite Herbert and Marilyn. They plopped onto the same side of the booth, slid to the far end, and pressed right up against each other. They overlooked the busy street. The woman tucked some hair behind her ear and kissed the man’s cheek. Marilyn noticed some lipstick on the man’s neck, a perfect circle of red. They had menus in front of them, but didn’t seem interested. They studied the traffic and passersby, and Marilyn thought she heard the young woman mutter something about a crow — something about how it was the only bird without a song.

What if Herbert had gone to architecture school like he’d wanted when they’d first met? Marilyn wondered. Would he have been happier, and thus made her happier? What if she hadn’t gotten pregnant right away with the twins, forcing him to marry and stick it out at his father’s accounting firm? Did he blame her for all of that?

She shifted her gaze towards the young man. How she missed Major. He was her first love. They had both grown up on the same street in Montpelier, Vermont. They had gone to the same grammar school, middle school, and high school. Always close and friendly, they became closer one night. It happened a week or so into their 10th-grade summer vacation. Major’s family had thrown a party for his older brother who’d recently graduated college. Marilyn had been happy as she danced in a dress that, she thought, looked similar to the young woman’s. She had been a bit tipsy with champagne and had spotted Major outside in a field of tall grass. It had been late, but still light out. Major had walked towards her and asked if she wanted to go for a stroll, head down to the Winooski River for a bit.

“Unreal,” Herbert said. “No water. No waitress. Tell you one thing — they keep this up, they won’t be busy for long.”

“They just haven’t got the kinks worked out yet.”

“Sometimes things never get the kinks worked out.”

Marilyn nodded, pulled a napkin from the dispenser, and spread it across her lap. Again, she glanced towards the couple. Her mind turned to Major. Down at the river, the two of them had dipped their feet into the Winooski, skipped stones, found stray branches, tossed them into the current and wondered where they’d end up. He’d kissed her — her first kiss and she’d let herself go. She hadn’t been sure how to kiss and had practiced on her bathroom mirror, but the real thing was different. She had left her lips parted and had let him do the work. Soft sounds had escaped her mouth, and she remembered the warmth of his touch.

“Where’s the waitress?” Herbert asked the hostess as she rushed by.

“No one came by yet?” she said.

“Nope.”

“Oh, wow. Opening weekend, you know?” She hurried off.

“What’s with the ‘opening weekend’ stuff?” Herbert said. “It’s a good thing these people don’t make cars. Can you imagine? Oh, yes, the brakes didn’t work. Sorry, sir. Brand new car — you know how it is?”

A laugh fluttered from the young couple’s table. They kissed again. Marilyn watched the man put his hand on the nape of the woman’s neck. She studied the way the woman’s chandelier earrings swayed.

The waitress showed up and apologized. She was short with long bangs and puffy cheeks. “Everyone’s got tons of coupons, and I didn’t think this was my section. Crazy, right?”

“I’ve heard crazier,” Herbert said.

Marilyn pulled out the coupon and slid it across the table.

“To drink?” the waitress asked.

“A water for me,” Herbert said.

“And I’ll take a vanilla shake.”

“You got it. Thank you,” the waitress said. She spun around and took the young couple’s order. They no longer kissed. They ordered something called the King and Queen Platter. The man looked exactly like Major when he laughed — the way he snapped his head back and then covered his mouth with his right hand, as if he never wanted to chuckle in the first place. After that night, she and Major had gone steady. Two years later, he was drafted for Vietnam. The night before he deployed, she’d met up with him at the Winooski, only a stone’s throw from where they’d first kissed. “I’ll be back soon. We’ll meet here again. I promise,” he’d said. Marilyn had cried, then said, “I wish your parents hadn’t named you Major. You can’t expect not to be drafted with a name like that.”

“They’re back at it,” Herbert said. “Will you look at these two kids… just kissing and kissing.”

“It’s … isn’t it just — ”

“Exactly. It’s just gross.”

Marilyn took a deep breath. On October 12, 1972, Marilyn had driven with her family and Major’s family to pick him up from the Burlington Airport. He’d strutted across the tarmac in a dark-green suit with gold buttons. He’d lost some weight and his skin was tanned. He’d hugged her hard, till her back was sore. After a few hours together, Marilyn had headed off to work. “Tonight?” he’d asked. “Ten o’clock at the Winooski?”

Marilyn and Herbert’s best day together had to be their wedding: big-band music, tiered cake, and a tossed bouquet. Since that time, it was like someone had taken a quarter from their savings account each day. It was hard to notice the loss at first, but now, only a few wrinkled bills remained. She was glad her children had moved away, hadn’t settled, and had searched for more.

The hostess craned her neck. The couple’s bodies were intertwined: her hands in his hair, his fingers on her collar bone, their lips wrapped around one another’s. Marilyn took in the other guests of the restaurant. None of them seem to notice or care. Some ate; others laughed and wiped their ketchup-covered mouths.

“I’ll get the manager,” the hostess said.

“You can’t tell ’em?” Herbert asked.

She headed off.

“Can you believe this?” Herbert said.

“Why?” Marilyn said. “What happened — ”

“What happened is right. What happened to people, to manners, to all of it?”

A short time later, the manager, a tall bald man with dark circles under his eyes, delivered Marilyn’s vanilla shake and Herbert’s water. “What seems to be the problem?”
“Not seems,” Herbert said. “What is the problem?” He pointed the way of the young couple.

“Oh. OK, sure.” The manager turned and took a few steps in their direction. He knocked on the far end of the table. The affectionate couple looked up. Their faces were rosy and their eyes large. “Please,” he said. “It’s makin’ people uncomfortable.”

Marilyn plucked a straw from the dispenser and dropped it into her shake.

“Uncomfortable?” the young woman said. “How? Why?”

“Are you kidding?” the young man said. “Just pathetic.”

The manager’s heavy footsteps softened as he headed away from the table. Herbert popped a baby aspirin in his mouth and downed it with a slug of water. Marilyn positioned her lips around the straw and drew in some vanilla milkshake. The cold was soothing.

For the sake of her children, and not wanting to be like her mother, Marilyn was demure, sweet, and always let Herbert get his way. She blamed herself, thinking that it could have been different if she’d just confronted him from time to time.

Laugher from the young couple wafted her way, and she thought of Major. Just as promised, he’d showed up that night at 10 at their usual spot on the Winooski, not far from the bridge. Even though it was October, the weather had still been tinged with summer. They’d kissed and talked, but mostly held one another. “I’m going for a swim,” Major had said. “Haven’t been in this sweet river in too long. When I get out, I need to ask you something.” He’d darted over to the bridge and stripped down to his boxers, then had brought his hands together above his head, bent his knees, and sprung forward.

Out of her periphery, Marilyn glanced the couple’s way. They were playing a sort of game. She listened closely, straining her ears. “The sixth man to walk through the door,” the young woman said. “That’s what you’re going to look like in 50 years. Wait for it, wait for it. Three and there’s four. And there’s… there’s! That’s five. Come on six! Lucky six!” They laughed. “The door stopped… what the… no, wait… here it comes!”

She giggled and the young man slapped the table.

“That’s not even a man!” he said, laughing. “She’s like 12.”

“Can’t fight the game,” she said.

Marilyn drank some more shake, then blotted her mouth with her napkin. She wondered about the young couple: where they’d met, how they’d met, if it was love at first sight, or if one of them really had to work for it. She always loved a good love story: Romeo and Juliet, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere, even Paris and Helen.

Smoky meat permeated the room. The din of the diner was now deafening with the clamor of plates and flatware, laughter and conversation. A car in the parking lot revved its engine.

“Christ almighty,” Herbert said, throwing a glower the couple’s way.

As Marilyn scanned the couple, the young man pulled his head back, opened his eyes, and drew in his partner. He smiled. Marilyn saw Major. She had witnessed him leap from the bridge, arc towards the water, and splash into the river. She’d clapped and smiled, her cheeks warm, and waited for him to pop back up. She’d wondered what his question would be. He hadn’t yet come to the surface and she’d called out and then yelled, screaming his name over and over, crying Major, so much and so hard that her throat burned. She’d sprinted into the water, her dress floating up around her. She’d waded out. She’d tried to find footing: “Major! Major! Major!”

The waitress swung by with a tray perched on her shoulder. She set it down on the edge of the table and placed a Reuben in front of both Marilyn and Herbert. “Can I get you guys anything else?”

“Tell those two to get a room,” Herbert said.

The waitress took a glance. “Yikes! You bet.” As she passed the young couple, she leaned forward. “Sorry, guys. Can’t do that here. This is a family place, all right?” She pressed on, weaving her way to the kitchen doors.

Herbert took a bite and ran his tongue over his lips. Marilyn added a squirt of ketchup to her sandwich. She heard the young couple: “A family place?” the young man said. “How the hell do they think families are made?”

The young woman laughed. “Who the hell keeps snitching?” she asked. “No one in here seems to care, except the damn waiters.”

The young man cleared his throat. “It’s him,” Marilyn thought she heard the young man say. “The old man. I think it’s him.”

Major diving from the bridge burned brightly in her mind. They’d found his body the next day at dawn, a few miles down the river. She’d never loved a man like she’d loved Major. He was Paris and everyone else was Cleveland. After him, she’d not wanted to be alone. A few months later, after she’d started at the barber college in upstate New York, she’d met Herbert. He was already frugal then, but he was tall and professional and he liked her. She knew that she’d be taken care of. She knew she’d no longer be alone. She knew they’d learn to live with one another, but never, like she and Major, for one another.

In 50 years, Marilyn thought, would the young woman look back and wonder about this guy, or would she be with him? Would they take trips from L.A.? Would they visit the Grand Canyon or see a show or two in Vegas? Would they still sit on the same side of the booth?

The diner’s volume increased — a child at a nearby table began to cry, the restaurant’s phone rang, a patron dropped some change onto the tile floor, and a car alarm blasted from the parking lot.

Marilyn swung her eyes to the right. The young couple was kissing. Their food had arrived, too, but it was just sitting there: a large platter piled with hamburgers, fries, onion rings, and two tall chocolate shakes with the leftovers in frosty metal tins, and strangely, two plastic crowns. One was fit for a king, the other a tiara. And then she remembered: the King and Queen Platter.

She took another bite of her sandwich. The salty beef paired well with the creaminess of the shake, and she let the juices of both coat her mouth. The young couple took a break from kissing, placed the crowns on their heads, and resumed making out. This time, their kisses were wet and hard, and when the diner’s noise softened, Marilyn heard their lips smack.

“For the love of God!” Herbert yelled in the direction of the young couple. He pounded his fists on the table, and the forks and knives jumped. “It’s enough. We’ve been polite. But it’s enough! It’s like we’re at some damn peep show.”

The couple stopped kissing.

“Peep show?” the young woman said, then laughed.

Marilyn felt her hands grow warm and her lips quiver. She clenched her jaw and took her milkshake in her hands. Her stomach turned. She took a breath and felt Major’s hands dig into her shoulder blades on the tarmac. She pictured the two of them on the riverbank, laughing, the flash of lightening bugs all around them.

The young man stared at Herbert. Marilyn swallowed. Her gulp felt so large that she believed everyone in the restaurant had seen it.

“What’s your problem?” the young man asked. His voice was sharp. He wasn’t afraid of Herbert. “We’re two people in love. We’re kissing. I haven’t seen her in a while, and now I’m back and I want to kiss my girlfriend.”

“This is not the place. This is a restaurant.” Herbert took a sip of water.

Little by little, a hush took hold of the place, and the attention of the diner turned the way of Herbert and the young couple. The crying baby didn’t stop and neither did the phone or the commotion in the kitchen, but casual conversations were muted, laugher paused, and bodies tense. Even though Marilyn couldn’t see all the people around her, she felt their eyes, their stares, and their focused burn.

“Haven’t you ever been in love?” the young man asked.

“Of course,” Herbert said. “That’s not the point.”

“That is the point,” the man said. “You’re a tired old man. There’s nothing weird about two people who love each other kissing. It’s about as interesting as a thirsty man drinking.”

“It’s not something that’s done in public,” Herbert said.

“Or, in your case, in private,” the young woman added. “Look at her.” Marilyn noticed the young woman point a finger her way. “Does she look happy? When was the last time you kissed her?”

The manager hurried over. He stood between the two tables. He extended his arms in both directions. “Please, please. I need to ask you all to lower your voices. Either finish your meals quietly or leave.”

The young man adjusted his crown, pulled a kosher dill from his plate, and gnawed off a hunk. “We’re not going anywhere,” the young man said.

“No service until it’s too late! How many times did I ask you all to handle this situation? And what did you do?” Herbert’s voice quivered and he bit the inside of his cheek.

“Situation?” the young woman said.

“I’m leaving. Let’s go, Marilyn,” Herbert said. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” He slid to the edge of the booth and used the table to yank himself up.

Marilyn reached for her purse and began to scoot towards the aisle way. Then she

stopped. Her legs were weak and her body hot. She could feel the patrons inspecting her every move. She couldn’t budge. She didn’t think she could even make it to the front door. “No,” she said.

“Marilyn, come on,” Herbert said. He walked her way as if to help her from the booth.

She pivoted her head and took in the clientele. They were fixated on her. Some chewed; others held fries and onion rings but were too captivated to put them in their mouths. “No,” she said again. “I want to finish my sandwich. I want to stay here.”

Again, Herbert reached for her arm, but she scooted back into the booth and picked up her Reuben. Herbert stormed away from the table and towards the front door, and she watched it swing open and fall back flush with the wall. She stared at him for as long as she could through one of the diner’s windows, until his body was just a blotch in the parking lot.

With each bite, the racket grew, and when Marilyn was done with most of her sandwich, she peered the couple’s way. They weren’t kissing as before, but the woman had nestled her head alongside her man’s.

Marilyn took a slurp of her shake. The young man noticed her and smiled Marilyn’s way, and she felt a grin form on her face. She loved the way his plastic crown sparkled in the afternoon sun. She kept stealing glances while taking bites, and every so often, she would close her eyes and hear the rush of the Winooski.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/party-two.html/feed91939 Plymouth, or The Bootlegger’s Driverhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/1939-plymouth-bootleggers-driver.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/12/29/post-fiction/contemporary-fiction-art-entertainment/1939-plymouth-bootleggers-driver.html#commentsWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=105511Immigrant Lüdvik Lendle loves America, a country where anything is possible. But on a road trip across America, he wonders what he has gotten himself into.

Lüdvik shielded his right eye with his right hand. His elbow rested on the table.

The sun had found a spot through the window and into the corner of his vision. He was focused on a full-page advertisement that had caught his attention: “New Free Book – How to Speak and Write Masterly English in 15 Minutes a Day.” He wrote down the address on a small square of paper.

A cloud drifted in front of the sun, and he relaxed his hand back onto the table, stopping to look at his fingernails, which were immaculate. He adjusted the green reading lamp and unfolded the paper to its full span.

It was his habit, every Sunday, his one day off from tinkering with watches in his cage at Gimbels, to come to the New York City Public Library and read TheNew York Times. Reading the newspaper like this made him feel like a rich man who could afford not only the price of a newspaper, but the time to read the entire thing, front to back. Normally, he’d steal a few words while riding the subway, and then it was mostly upside down.

Lüdvik could still feel a slight throbbing in his feet from last night’s dancing. After Lüdvik’s cajoling and threatening to leave his brother behind in their dingy apartment in the Bronx, Lüdvik and Izak had found their way into a dance hall in Times Square. Lüdvik spotted the prettiest girl and asked her to dance. He laughed as he watched his brother’s shy and pained look from the sidelines. Lüdvik and the girl jitterbugged, cha-cha’d, then took in a slow dance before the crowd yelled “Happy New Year!” and she stole a kiss. Not a bad way to end and begin his first year in New York City.

Read all the winning stories from the Great American Fiction Contest 2015:

He pulled out the handkerchief from his pocket and unfolded it. In the center was a deep pink stain. He held the cotton square to his nose and breathed in. Cherry, roses, and licorice. In his village back home, he would have been shunned for even thinking of dancing with a non-Jewish girl.

He loved America.

The smell lingered in his nostrils as he caught sight of a headline next to the account of the New Year’s celebration. “Faulhaber Sermon Makes Concessions to the Nazis.”

Lüdvik read each word very slowly.

“Bastards,” Lüdvik spoke out loud. “Bastards.”

“Quiet, please,” a stern voice whispered in his direction.

Lüdvik folded the corner of his handkerchief and daubed his eyes, nodding apologetically.

The sun poked its way from behind another cloud. Lüdvik shook his head and placed the newspaper back on the wooden rod.

Enough bad news for one day.

The cold air hit him even before he opened the door. Pulling his overcoat tightly around his body, he tugged on his hat and tightened his scarf. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of brown leather gloves. His manager at Gimbels had given them to him for a Christmas present. He’d never received a Christmas present before. The funny thing was that his boss was also a Jew, but he was learning that Jews in America were different, very different.

Feeling the soft leather against his cold skin, Lüdvik worried about how to break the news that his hours at work had been cut, since business was always slow after the holidays. Izak was not going to be happy about this.

“At least the rent is paid for January.”

Lüdvik turned the corner just as the sun hit the windshield of a car; Lüdvik stopped and again brought his hand to his eyes.

“She’s a beaut, huh?”

Lüdvik looked up to see a man dressed like Tyrone Power, in a wide lapelled suit with thin white stripes. His shoulders looked as if they could stretch across the block. The man was leaning against the most beautiful car Lüdvik had ever seen.

Sitting in the passenger seat was a woman with white blond hair. She wore a mink coat with the collar pulled up close around her neck. She was attractive in a way that felt familiar to Lüdvik.

“Just picked it up from the show room. Right off the assembly line.”

The car was a buttery green, with bright red leather seats that looked even softer to the touch than his gloves. The hubcaps were chrome and without a smudge. Despite the cold weather, the top was down, exposing an expansive backseat.

Lüdvik liked the man’s short and straightforward answers. He bet he was the kind of man who could spend as much time as he wanted reading the newspaper.

“Lüdvik. Lüdvik Lendl.”

“Hello, Lüdvik,” Greta said softly. She smiled and he saw that she had a gap between her two top teeth.

Polish, thought Lüdvik. He’d recognize that accent anywhere. After four months of sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms in Danzig to earn enough money for transit to Canada, the lilt and thickness of a Polish voice was forever embedded in his brain.

“Dzień dobry. Jak się masz?”

The woman’s face lit up and she jumped out of the car. She began talking rapidly with Lüdvik, mostly one-sided, as she was so excited to be speaking to someone in her mother tongue.

“Cartwright, Lüdvik’s from my mother’s part of the world. He’s Czech.”

“Well, what do ya know? Small world! Greta here escaped the Nazis by the skin of her beautiful teeth. She got out right after old Adolf took over their country.”

Lüdvik looked away uncomfortably. Greta elbowed Cartwright in the side and shook her head.

“Sorry, he forgets that some things are just too hard to speak of.”

Lüdvik tipped his hat toward Greta and extended his hand to Cartwright.

“Well, Happy New Year. I hope you’re driving somewhere nice. It was good to meet you. Do widzenia.”

His stomach growled and he wondered if the automat would even be open on New Year’s Day.

“We’re driving to California. Hollywood, California. I gotta get Greta out of the city. She hates the city, especially in the winter.”

California? Lüdvik stopped in his tracks. He turned around and spied a large picnic basket in the backseat.

“I’ve always wanted to go to California. I hear there are orange and lemon trees everywhere and all the women,” Lüdvik paused, suddenly too shy to continue.

“Are as beautiful as my Greta,” Cartwright finished for him. “Yessiree, and you can smell the ocean air as far as the mountains. It’s paradise.”

A gust of cold wind blew Lüdvik’s hat off his head. He ran a few steps to catch it and felt the cold hit his chest, through his coat, shirt, and undershirt.

“Say, don’t know if this tickles your fancy at all, but Greta can’t drive a lick and it’s a long stretch to the West Coast for one driver. We’d cover your food and board along the way, as well as some spending dough. Whad’ya think?”

Lüdvik thought of his brother Izak still asleep in their cold apartment. He wouldn’t be up for hours. He never ventured out on Sundays, as if he could catch up on lost sleep and store up some for the coming week. What would he think of this crazy scheme? Think? He’ll murder me, Lüdvik thought, and shook his head slightly.

“I have a brother in the Bronx. I can’t just leave him. He’ll have my head,” Lüdvik said.

“You can send him a telegram. What can your brother do? You’re a grown man and you’re in America now – it’s the land of opportunity! If he has any smarts, he’ll jump on the next train and join you.”

Lüdvik took in the sight of the car for a few more seconds, memorizing its lines and curves, which struck a close resemblance to the curve of Greta’s lips.

Cartwright walked to the driver’s door and opened it. Greta moved to the center of the front seat and patted the driver’s seat with her white-gloved hand.

The seat was warm from the sun. Lüdvik put his hands on the steering wheel and wrapped his fingers around it. He took a deep breath in and held it in for a few seconds, as if he knew it was the last of the city’s air he’d be breathing, at least for a while.

“What’s the fastest way out of the city?”

Cartwright jumped in next to Greta and slammed the door shut.

“Thatta boy, now you’re acting like a real American. We’ll take the George Washington Bridge to Jersey and then just keep heading west.”

Lüdvik turned the ignition key. The engine turned over smoothly. Cartwright pushed a button and the top began to unroll up toward the sky.

Lüdvik put the car in drive and gently pushed his foot down on the accelerator.

Izak stirred in his sleep. The blanket had fallen off the bed and the hissing of the radiator had turned into a steady clang. He threw the thin excuse for a blanket back up over his body and kicked the radiator three times. The clanging slowed and returned to a soft hiss.

Before he settled back to fall asleep, he lifted his head and looked at his brother’s bed. It was empty; the sheet and blanket were pulled tautly over the sagging mattress with military precision. Izak never made his bed; he figured he was just going to collapse in it at night, so why bother? But his younger brother, Lüdvik, was all about precision and timing. A walking timepiece, his brother was.

He knew Lüdvik was at the library reading his Sunday paper. Meshugener. Why would anyone be at the library when you could be warm in your bed? He chuckled to himself and quickly fell back into a deep snore, happy in the thought that his brother would bring him back a kolach and hot coffee.

The car rolled through the indiscriminate New Jersey towns, one after another. It seemed as if the entire state was asleep. No cars on the road, no people waiting for the bus or train. Lüdvik settled in behind the wheel. Occasionally, he’d glance to his right at Greta, who had fallen asleep with her head resting on Cartwright’s left shoulder.

“Wait until we get into Pennsylvania,” Cartwright said. “Past Philly and into farmland. Then you’ll get a real sense of what makes this country so great. We’ll cable your brother from there – what did you say his name is?”

“Izak, but his boss calls him Izzie.”

The mention of Izak’s name made Lüdvik tighten his grip. Now that he was a few hundred miles from the city, Lüdvik felt a sense of dread.

“Izzie, I like that. Maybe we should do the same for your name. No offense, but with the current state of things with the Krauts, you might think about changing it,” Cartwright said.

“What about Leonard?” Cartwright suggested. “That’s pretty close to Lüdvik?”

“I like Lüdvik,” Greta said in a sleepy voice. “It’s a very distinguished name.”

Leonard, Lüdvik mulled in his mind. Like Leonardo da Vinci. He liked it.

“We’ll call you Leonard for this trip and you’ll see how it fits. Or even better, Leo. If you like it, you can make it permanent,” Cartwright said. “That’s the great thing about this country. Anyone can become anything they want. A Lüdvik can become a Leo, just like that.”

Lüdvik had taken possession of the backseat after they’d left Missouri early that morning and had finally fallen asleep somewhere between Oklahoma and Texas. It had been a raucous night with Cartwright and his friends, one that included too much beer, something called a barbeque, and an argument with Izak, whom Lüdvik finally called.

After they arrived and Cartwright and Greta were settled in with their friends and family, Lüdvik excused himself.

“Lüdvik? Lüdvik? Is dat you? Oy, your brother is ready to lose his mind with worry! Have you been kidnapped?”

“No, Mrs. Henshen,” Lüdvik responded, picturing in his mind her standing in her robe and curlers. “I’m on a business trip. Would you mind getting Izak?”

“Izak, Lüdvik’s on the line!”

“Did you get my telegram?” Lüdvik began, but didn’t get very far.

“Are you out of your mind??? Yes, I got your ferkockte telegram. What kind of meshugener nonsense is this?” Izak bellowed. “Where the hell are you? Do you have any idea how sick with worry I’ve been?”

“I’m very, very sorry, Izak,” Lüdvik said. No matter what, Izak was his older brother and the closest thing to a father figure Lüdvik had ever had.

“It’s not like I can go to the police and ask them to look for you,” Izak shouted. “What would I tell them, that my brother who has been in the country for close to 10 years, but hasn’t bothered to become a citizen, is missing? They’d find you and ship you back to stand in line at the concentration camps with the rest of the family, you idiot.”

Lüdvik could hear the panic in Izak’s voice, which had softened enough so that he could hear his older brother choking back tears as well.

“Hey, buddy,” Cartwright said, coming around the corner of the hallway. “I want to introduce you to a few people. You gonna be much longer?”

Lüdvik covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

“I’ll join you in a few minutes,” he said.

“OK, but don’t keep us waiting too long,” Cartwright said. “The party is just getting started!”

“Lüdvik,” Izak shouted into the phone. “Where the hell are you?”

Lüdvik took a big breath.

“St. Louis,” he answered. “On my way to California. Before you start shouting at me again, let me tell you about Cartwright and Greta, and the most beautiful car you’d ever wish to see.”

Lüdvik told Izak about the library, the cold morning, of meeting Cartwright and his beautiful Polish wife, Greta. He told him how much he hated New York City. He told his brother he didn’t come to America to be stuck in a cold, gray city with cold, gray people. They’d left all that behind in their homeland.

“I’ll be all right, Izak,” Lüdvik said. “Cartwright has good connections and I’ll send for you in a month or two; a first-class ticket. We don’t belong in New York, at least I don’t. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“What about your job, Lüdvik? You have a good job and you’re just walking away like a madman?”

Lüdvik took a deep breath. He could still feel the rattle of the pneumonia that had almost sent him back to Europe when he first landed.

“I was going to tell you last night,” he said. “They cut my hours to less than half. Something about after Christmas, it being slow. But I paid the rent for January.”

Lüdvik could hear his brother taking his time answering him.

“You must be very, very careful,” Izak said slowly knowing there was nothing he could do. “Does this Cartwright character know you’re not a ‘real’ American?”

“Don’t worry. I have to go, someone is waiting to use the phone,” Lüdvik said, avoiding his brother’s question. “I’ll call you when I get to California. Please, don’t worry.”

Lüdvik hung up the phone. He felt slightly faint and leaned against the patterned wallpaper. He stared at the family portraits that covered the hallway. Photographs of Cartwright and his family in round, wooden frames, stared back at him.

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his wallet. He unfolded two photographs and sank down to the floor.

One photograph was of his family. It was frayed at the edges, but he could still make the details: his mother’s elegant and angular cheek line, his father’s round jowls and receding hairline. He and Izak stood together on one side of them, with Herschel, the next oldest, on the other. His younger siblings stood in tight semicircle in front.

Lüdvik took out a second photograph, one he and Izak had taken the day they had arrived in New York City. They were both wearing new suits and hats, but that was where the similarity stopped. Lüdvik’s suit was impeccable, with his kerchief perfectly squared in his pocket, his hat tilted just right. Izak looked ill at ease in his suit, which had become wrinkled in the summer heat.

“I promise you,” Lüdvik said and put the photos back into his pocket. “I will be all right.”

“Lüdvik, Lüdvik,” Greta said softly as she reached into the backseat and nudged his shoulder softly.

“Geesh, Greta,” Cartwright said as he pushed his foot down harder on the accelerator. “That’ll never do the trick.”

The car swerved sharply, knocking Lüdvik over and jolting him out of his deep sleep.

The sky was orange and red, and stretched across the expanse as far as he could see. The colors matched the color of the ground in a seamless way. Deep, cavernous canyons went on forever. Lüdvik thought they must have driven off the earth entirely. He shook his head and pinched his thigh to see if he were still dreaming.

Cartwright pulled the car over and turned off the engine.

“Get out and stretch your legs,” Cartwright commanded. “You’ve been sleeping since Oklahoma.”

Lüdvik opened the door and stepped out.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“Why, it’s the Grand Canyon, you knucklehead! Whad’ya think, that we landed on Mars?”

With that Cartwright walked Lüdvik over to a chain link fence; the only barrier that separated the two from falling.

“But how could a place like this happen?” Lüdvik said, and shook his head. “Izak will never believe that this place exists. Never!”

“Greta, get the camera.”

Greta reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a small camera, one just like the Kodak Brownie Lüdvik had wanted, but which he decided was an extravagance.

“Come on, let’s get you looking like a real American,” Cartwright said. He pulled Lüdvik in front of the Plymouth and directed him to cross his arms across his chest. “Yeah, just like that. You know, you’re just good looking enough to be a movie actor. I know some folks who owe me a favor, if it’s a line of work you’d like to try.”

They took a series of photos and stood in front of the canyon until the sun perched just above the top rim.

“We better get going,” Cartwright said and threw the keys to Lüdvik. “Arizona is wickedly brutal, even in winter. Greta, pour the man a cup of coffee and give him some breakfast. I’m going to get some shuteye. Make sure you wake me before we get to Nevada. I have a guy I need to see.”

Greta glanced at Lüdvik in a way that made his stomach clench, and not from the lack of breakfast. He took one last look at the red horizon. Greta slid in next to him and as he turned the ignition, she formed her gloved hand into the shape of a gun against the red leather seat.

They’d arrived in Boulder City, Nevada, just before dusk. Cartwright instructed Lüdvik to pull into a small coffee shop, where he downed a cold glass of milk and a slice of apple pie before excusing himself to the men’s room. He emerged a few minutes later, clean shaven and smiling.

“Let’s show Leo the greatest engineering feat known to mankind,” he said and left two quarters on the table.

The sound preceded their arrival. Bright white concrete glared and the thundering water seemed endless and was a stark contrast to the countless miles of desert they’d just passed through.

“C’mon, you have to stand close to really experience it,” Cartwright grabbed Lüdvik by the arm. Greta held back and shook her head back and forth with a firm, no.

“She’s afraid of heights,” he chuckled. “Boulder Dam. Took more than 20,000 men to build it. Can you imagine? More than 20,000. You know what you’re looking at, Leo.”

Lüdvik looked at the rushing water and then back at Cartwright, then shook his head.

Cartwright punched his fist onto the rail. “You’re looking at greatest country in the whole damn world.”

The marquee read in tall black letters: “The Girl of the Golden West,” with the names Jeannette McDonald and Nelson Eddy underneath. Cartwright barely waited for Lüdvik and Greta to get out of the car before he peeled away in a dust cloud.

Lüdvik and Greta settled into their seats as the newsreel starting playing. A young starlet, Judy Garland, was on the screen, waving and smiling from a flowered covered float. She was dressed in her Dorothy of Oz costume and seated next to her was a small black dog, whose wagging tail was in contrast to his growling and barking.

The newsreel announcer’s voice took on a serious tone as a subtitle flashed across the screen: “Kindertransport, Jewish Children Leave Prague for London.”

Lüdvik didn’t respond back. His mind turned into slow motion as he scoured the faces of the children, who were waving. Groups of well-dressed parents, stood along a silver rail. They held and kissed their children. Also wearing their best clothing, the children, in twos, boarded a waiting airplane. The story ended with a close up of the pilot with a halo of blazing light behind him.

“Maybe your brothers are on that plane,” she whispered. “Cartwright knows people in London.”

She put her hand on top of his and squeezed it gently.

“Let’s go get a drink,” she said. “I hate musicals.”

The bar was empty, save for Greta and Lüdvik, who sat at a corner table. Lüdvik cradled a whiskey on ice, while Greta sipped at some brandy.

“Sixteen years old? And why then?”

Lüdvik let the harsh flavors linger on his tongue. He looked at Greta’s round and soft face and could see small puffs of face powder that had settled in the lines above her lips.

He talked about the rabbi who had beaten his younger brother, Shmuel, and how his father had done nothing. Lüdvik explained that the rabbi would never punish the rich children, but instead would find a small infraction that one of the poorer children had done and beat them to send everyone a lesson. He’d been the subject of those beatings plenty of times and he was tough enough to take it, but when he saw the red welts on his 7-year-old brother’s back, it was a different story.

“Your father wouldn’t do anything because he was a rabbi, yes?”

Lüdvik nodded. He took a large swig and swallowed.

“So you decided to take things into your own hands instead, right?” Greta motioned to the bartender for another brandy, as well as a second drink for Lüdvik.

Lüdvik had waited in the bushes next to the rabbi’s house. Behind his hand he held a single ice skate, one that he shared with his brothers and sister to take turns with on the small pond just beyond their street. The blade was cold against his palm.

The rabbi stepped onto his front stoop. With his hands behind his back, the rabbi began to walk quickly down the street. Lüdvik knew he was rushing to get to morning prayers before the school day started.

Lüdvik gave the rabbi a head start.

When the rabbi came to a small grove of trees, Lüdvik caught up with him.

“If you ever touch anyone in my family again, I’ll finish the job,” Lüdvik said. He wiped the ice skate against the snow, leaving a thin, red stain, and threw it toward the trees.

“That was the end of that,” Lüdvik said and pushed his empty glass to the edge of the table. “He never touched anyone again.”

Greta shook her head and put her hand on Lüdvik’s, which sent a soft tingle up and down his spine.

“My father made arrangements for me to learn the watch trade. I apprenticed while he worked to get me to Canada. It was probably for the best,” Lüdvik said, sliding his hand out from underneath Greta’s. “Should we go find Cartwright?”

“He knows where to find us. This is where I always wait for him while he takes cares of his business.”

From the way Greta emphasized the word business, Lüdvik knew whatever Cartwright was up to made her uneasy. He looked at her fingernails, something he did with all women, and saw that there was a reason she wore gloves most of the time. Her nails and cuticles were bitten to the quick.

She withdrew her hands from the table.

“The liquor was one thing; in those days, everyone was dying of thirst and Cartwright had the knack, is that what you call it? The knack of being in the right place at the right time. He’d deliver the booze to the big machers, the big whigs. They paid him in cars, furs and cash. But now that the booze is flowing free again,” Greta said and took a large gulp of her brandy, “he’s moved onto other things. Things that make me nervous.”

Lüdvik remembered Greta’s hand forming the shape of a gun against the red leather upholstery.

A gunrunner. A gangster. Oy, what have I gotten himself into this time?

Cartwright appeared at the bar an hour later, reeking of whiskey and cigars. He reeled toward the table and slid into the seat next to Greta, planting a sloppy and wet kiss on her cheek.

“Ugh, you’ve been drinking,” she said and wiped the kiss off with the back of her hand. “You smell like a brothel.”

“You should have come with me, Leo,” Cartwright said. He motioned to the bartender, but Greta waved him off.

“Sorry, buddy, but we’re closing up. Besides, you look like you’ve had more than enough,” the bartender said.

“You’re a very wise man,” Cartwright shouted back. “I am fairly snonkered. Thank goodness we have our friend Leo here to drive. Where would we be without our handsome little friend from Czechoslovakia? How would my Pollack wife be kept amused from New York to California without him? Hey, I’ve got a great joke – a Pollack and a Czech walk into a bar…”

“Let’s get on the road,” he said, staring into Cartwright’s drunken gaze. “You promised me I’d see the sunset over the Pacific by tomorrow.”

Lüdvik pushed down on the accelerator. He was in no mood to linger in this town, and it wasn’t until they were in the open space of the desert that he was able to get the image of the kindertransport out of his mind.

Lüdvik looked past the windshield to endless sky and open space. Low growing grasses hugged the ground, with sand dunes rising and falling in rhythm with the movement of the car. He felt as if he were Lawrence of Arabia; a book he’d poured over countless times at the library.

“Beautiful, yes?” Greta said. They’d been silent since they’d left the bar.

“Don’t be angry at him,” Greta continued. “He only gets like that when he drinks too much. He saved my life, you know. I was a starving little nothing when we met. Just off the boat and with nothing and no one. He was working the docks and saw me. He gave me the coat off his back. Took me to the corner store and bought me a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup. I hate to think what would have become of me.”

Greta pulled her expensive coat around her tightly.

“Greta?” Cartwright’s voice came from the backseat. “Pour me a cup of coffee, would ya? I’ll give Leo here a break from driving and you can get some shut eye.”

Greta handed the Thermos cup carefully to Cartwright, who was leaning forward between her and Lüdvik. He finished one cup and then another, then tapped on Lüdvik’s shoulder, instructing him to pull over.

“I’m fine, Cartwright,” Lüdvik said. “I don’t need a break.”

“Just pull over,” Cartwright insisted. “I need to see a man about a leak.”

Lüdvik shook his head and eased over to side of the road. Cartwright stumbled out the back and walked behind a large shrub. Greta looked the other way and climbed into the backseat.

“Slide on over, partner,” Cartwright said. “I’ll take us into Los Angeles from here. This way you can take in the view. Besides, we have some talking to do.”

The San Gabriel Mountains surprised Lüdvik. They were jagged and gray, so different than the first mountains he’d seen when he arrived in Nova Scotia a decade before. Those were deep green and rolled out in gentle waves. He lost count of the sage colored yucca plants and twisted pine trees they’d passed and he wanted to stop to look at them further, but Cartwright was too busy talking to be interrupted.

“The liquor was a way out of a trail to nowhere,” Cartwright said. “I was just good looking enough to get the small bits in the movies, but the stuff bored me to tears. And there’s no money in it, unless you’re a Douglas Fairbanks. But I learned quickly that movie stars like their liquor and I knew where to get it. It was that simple. But things changed when the feds opened the gin mills again. Changed, and became more interesting.”

“Did you think about joining the army?” Lüdvik asked.

“Tried to, but the hearing in my left ear isn’t so good. Too close to a gunshot on a set,” Cartwright answered. “But I serve this country in other ways.

“You know, there’re a lot of people in your part of the world who are working ‘behind the scenes’ to stop Hitler and his cronies,” Cartwright said and looked into the rearview mirror. Greta was fast asleep. “I help supply them with what they need.”

Lüdvik jerked his head toward his companion.

“Don’t worry,” Cartwright continued. “I wouldn’t involve you. Unless you really want to learn the business. I could use a man like you. Get the feel of things and think about it. You could end up being a very wealthy man. A real American success story.”

They sped by a grove of trees and Lüdvik took in a deep breath.

“Oranges,” he said.

Cartwright swerved to the side of the rode. He jumped out and ran into the small orchard, returning with his arms full. Laughing, he poured the armful into Lüdvik’s lap.

“Welcome to California!”

“I promised you’d see the sunset in California,” Cartwright said. He and Lüdvik stood on the beach, their pant legs rolled up to their shins.

Lüdvik had no words to express what he was seeing. A huge golden orb rolled along the water’s horizon, lowering a little bit with each breath he took.

“Nothing like it in the world,” Cartwright sighed. “I could afford a bigger house and Greta is itching to have one, but I don’t want to give up this.”

“It’s like a dream,” Lüdvik said.

The two men stood and watched the sun lower, which seemed to take an eternity before it was just suddenly gone, leaving behind streaks of purple, orange, and red.

“C’mon, we’d better head back. Greta’s making a real Polish spread to welcome us home. You’ll have plenty of sunsets to catch,” Cartwright said.

“Izzy, it’s paradise,” Lüdvik whispered into the phone. “Orange groves and palm trees. Anything is possible here, I can feel it. No cold winter, no gray people or buildings. And the light, the light is like silver!”

Lüdvik waited for a response from his older brother.

“When will you be back?” Izak answered. “You’ve probably lost the few hours you did have at Gimbels. Those kinds of jobs don’t grow on trees, despite what your friend will tell you.”

Lüdvik could hear the tension in Izak’s voice.

“It’s late, Lüdvik,” Izak said with a sigh. “I have to go to bed. Don’t get sick on the oranges.”

Lüdvik hung up the phone, which was located in the little bedroom he was staying in. It was the first room he’d ever had to himself. He looked around at the simply decorated room and could feel Greta’s old world touches. He could stay in this room forever.

At first, Lüdvik did odd jobs around the house. He fixed the roof, got rid of the squeaky back door, and sealed the cracks in the driveway. At the end of each week, he’d wire half his money to his brother, putting in an extra dollar or two.

The first real job Cartwright sent him on was simple – deliver gin and cigars to a mansion in Beverly Hills. He’d never seen a place so massive and regal, not one that people actually lived in. He rang the doorbell and a dark-skinned man answered, dressed in a tuxedo. He took the delivery and instructed Lüdvik to wait.

A tall and very handsome man sauntered down the marble stairwell. A movie star. The man shook Lüdvik’s hand with vigor and smiled a broad smile. He handed him a thick envelope.

“Did my man offer you a drink?”

Lüdvik shook his head, no.

“Foster,” shouted the man. “Bring some lemonade. The Santa Anas are making everyone thirsty. So, you’re Cartwright’s new delivery guy, huh? He and I go way back.”

The movie star ushered Lüdvik through the house. He opened a back door to something Lüdvik had never seen before – a swimming pool. It was the shape of a figure eight and had graceful stone figures of unclad men on either side.

“Albert, say hello to Cartwright’s new delivery boy,” the movie star said. A tanned hand rose up and waved to Lüdvik in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable.

“You’re more than welcome to take a dip in the pool to cool off,” Albert offered.

“I have more deliveries to make,” Lüdvik answered.

“Say, I have an idea,” the movie star said. “I could use a good-looking guy like you in my next film. We start in a couple of days. Just come to the lot and tell them Ronnie told them to let you in. And if you have any friends like you, tell them to come too. Whad’ya say your name was?”

“Leo,” Lüdvik said. “Leo Lendl.”

The butler handed Lüdvik a tall glass of lemonade. He drank it quickly and put it back on the waiting silver tray.

Sundays were his days off, so early the next morning, Lüdvik showed up at the film lot. To his surprise, he was allowed inside and instructed to head to Back Lot No. 3, where a bus was waiting.

The bus lurched out of the studio and headed through the streets of Los Angeles until they got to a field. A makeshift factory town had been constructed and Lüdvik saw large movie cameras on stands. A man with a clipboard instructed Lüdvik, and the other men who had also ridden on the bus, to follow him.

Each man was handed overripe tomatoes. They were told to throw the tomatoes in the direction of the lead actor, who was the movie star Lüdvik had met the day before. He was standing on a platform and seemed to be delivering a speech of some kind. Some of the men were holding placards that had slogans on them that Lüdvik didn’t really understand, but he did what he was told to do. He and the others pounded the movie star with the tomatoes, hitting his bright white shirt and pressed pants, but not his face. They’d been given strict instructions to not let even one tomato seed hit his face. Anyone who did wouldn’t get their day’s pay.

Lüdvik was amazed at how long this process took. They’d throw the tomatoes until someone would call “cut,” at which point the movie star would be ushered away and would then return with a newly bright white shirt and pressed pants. They must have used a truckload of overripe tomatoes until another person yelled, “That’s a wrap.”

Lüdvik wasn’t even sure that the movie star knew he had been there.

The house was empty and the Plymouth was gone. A bowl of borscht was on the table with a slab of bread, which Lüdvik finished off quickly. He placed three tomatoes in a bowl and left them on the counter.

Lüdvik was going to call Izak to tell him about his crazy day when he saw a letter on his pillow.

Dear Leo,

You have to get out of here tonight. I’ve booked a ticket for a train back to New York for you; even got you a room, so you can travel in style, plus a little extra for you and your brother.

Things have turned sour for me and there’s going to be a raid. I can handle it and so can Greta, but if you get mixed up in this mess, you’ll be thrown out of the country and we both know what that will mean.

Take care of yourself.

The letter was signed by both of them, and next to Greta’s signature was the imprint of her lipstick. Lüdvik brought the letter to his nose. Jasmine.

Lüdvik exchanged the room ticket for a single seat. He leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes. He put his hand inside his coat jacket and gently tapped at the letter. Should be enough, he thought, enough for two tickets back to California.

He felt the city fade into the valley and then into the desert. It was dusk, exactly the same time he’d arrived almost two months to the day.

He craned his neck and caught the last glimpse of the setting sun, just as the train took a wide turn away from the sinking red and orange ball.

Meet the Winner!

N. West Moss

N. West Moss

“Am I dreaming?” asked Moss when notified her story “Omeer’s Mangoes” had won first place, publication in printand online, and a prize of $500. “I am thrilled beyond belief to be in a publication I hold in such high esteem.”

Her vividly written story drew inspiration from real-life events. “My father died last year, and about a month later, my mother and I went to New York City to visit the apartment that my parents kept for 30 years,” says Moss. “It sits right across the street from Bryant Park. When we got there, the doorman — also there for 30 years — greeted us, took my mother’s hand and asked, ‘How is Mr. Moss?’ Informed my father had died, the doorman froze, then turned to the wall and wept. His sobbing in the corner of the lobby over my father’s death was the spark for ‘Omeer’s Mangoes.’

“‘Omeer’s Mangoes’ is my first piece of fiction to reach a national audience,” says Moss. “The New York Times published an essay back in 2008, and that was exciting and unexpected. But this is exciting in a completely different way. Having people read my fiction feels much more vulnerable because it is entirely mine in a way that nonfiction skirts.”

After graduating with her MFA from William Paterson University in 2013 at age 49, Moss took a year off to write full-time —“5 to 10 hours each day.” She has won several awards — the Faulkner-Wisdom Award and Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction — for her work, which has appeared primarily in literary journals, including The Westchester Review, The Blotter, and Hospital Drive.

Meet the Runners-Up

Each runner-up receives $100 and publication of his or her work on our website. (To read the prize-winning stories, click the titles below.) We salute these fine writers and the more than 200 others who entered our 2015 contest.

Winner:

A single mom struggles with school politics and a rebellious preteen in this complex portrait of a family at a crossroads.

Bio: Before focusing on her own stories, Davis worked at Harper’s Magazine and as a story editor for Wildwood Enterprises—Robert Redford’s production company. Though a finalist for many awards, Davis says, “This is the first time I’ve won.” Her work has been published in The Literary Review, Gemini Magazine, and Tattoo Highway. Her essay, “This House,” was published in the anthology, Morning Coffee and Other Stories: Mothering Children with Special Needs.

Runners-Up:

Garrison Knight commands his orchestra with power and grace until a musician’s strike and his attraction to a young violinist combine to threaten his orderly world.

Bio: Bartels—“a copywriter by day, a novelist at night”—worked for a book publisher for 12 years. In January 2013, she embarked on a personal goal of writing one short story each month: “This Elegant Ruin” was her March story. Bartels is currently working on a novel, as well as a non-fiction e-book that she will release in spring 2014.

The discovery of a windfall in the backseat of a cab on Christmas Eve triggers an ethical conundrum. But the driver’s chance encounter with three strangers leads to an unexpected decision.

Bio: A runner-up in our 2013 Great American Fiction Contest for his short story “The Wolf Boy of Forest Lawn,” Eoannou is also a two-time Pushcart Award nominee and a finalist for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. His fiction has appeared in Rosebud and The MacGuffin among other literary journals. His first short story collection, Muscle Cars, will be published in spring 2015.

A young mother, bolstered by unwavering love for her children, struggles with the isolation and stigma of divorce during the 1960s.

Bio: Hunt is the author of the Tess Camillo mystery series, which won a Best Books Award in 2008 from U.S. Book News and a National Indie Excellence Award. She has published poetry and non-fiction in various outlets including Writer’s Digest.

In promoting a talented young street musician from New Orleans, a gallery curator rediscovers her own artistic ambitions.

Bio: A veteran freelance writer, Venzon spent 10 years writing high school family and consumer science books for Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in national magazines, including St. Anthony Messenger and The Christian Science Monitor. Venzon won the 2010 Highlights for Children fiction contest and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2011.

By Robert Steven WilliamsFor Davida and Granny Jack, life in the projects is a daily challenge. With her father’s pending release from prison, Davida plans an escape from the war-torn neighborhood and family ties that both alienate and sustain.

Bio: In 2013, Williams released his first novel, My Year as a Clown, which won the Silver Medal for popular fiction in the 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards. A finalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, Williams is now working on a second novel, as well as a documentary about F. Scott Fitzgerald.

]]>We’re pleased to announce Lucy Jane Bledsoe as the winner of our 2013 Great American Fiction Contest! Read her prize-winning story, “Wolf,” and stories from our six runners-up below.

To purchase the collection Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest: 2013, which includes the winning short story, 5 stories from our runners-up, and 6 additional stories not available online, visit shopthepost.com.

Winner:

As Jim tries to identify with the Yellowstone wolf trackers, both he and his wife have an awakening that changes their lives forever.

Bio: Lucy Jane Bledsoe has authored four novels and six children’s books, and her work has appeared in literary magazines. Awards include the California Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the 2009 Sherwood Anderson Prize for Fiction, and a California Arts Council Fellowship.

Isolated by the domestication of his family household, a desperate husband initiates a series of self-destructive acts in an attempt to rediscover the relationships he once knew with his wife and daughter.

Bio: Andrew Hamilton lives in Lookout Mtn., Tennessee. His poetry has appeared in literary magazines.

All Big Rosco has going for him is his love for Loretta, his big ears, and a windmill-tilting spirit worthy of Don Quixote. Is that enough to save the Pewhasset Pie Palace from the clutches of the villainous Taco Charlie and the destructive power of The World Famous Twelve Flags Amusement Park and Arcade Extravaganza?

Bio: Cynthia J. McGean is a teacher and award-winning writer (Writer’s Digest, Ogle, and more) who is currently working on two novels.

By Marvin PletzkeMilvey is a loner. Each time he enters the world to compete, he does something to derail himself. Believing in oneself is not always an option. Seems that some people just aren’t meant to be where they find themselves.

Bio: Marvin Pletzke is an established playwright living in Malden on Hudson, New York. This is his first short story published by a national magazine.